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Julia Nolet's avatar

Just joined your blog. Absolutely brilliant. Serendipity led me to it (I had a close friend -- not you-- named Kirsten Bell ). so glad I discovered you. Julia Frey (juliafreyauthor.com)

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Lia's avatar

I had a similar experience to yours in a Moroccan bath house, while I was a guest of a friend's family. Although panries where in use, oddly, and you had to take a dry pair for later. The experience included the violent scrubbing. I can still remember the fascination of my hosts at the amount of dry skin they could get out of a never-before-scrubbed body! One of the women I was with apparently scrubbed her skin so hard that she sometimes got bruised skin, and was reproached for that.

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Lia's avatar

By the way, have you tackled the odd habits of British people of washing their dishes in a bowl of hot soapy water and not rinsing them? I mean, the idea of drinking from glasses covered in a thin layer of dried soap and whatever grime was in the water after washing dishes and cutlery...why?!

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Kirsten Bell's avatar

Funnily enough, Marie Nauppas raised this topic as well in our original email conversation, but I couldn't figure out how to bring them together in the same post, although I suspect they are conceptually related. A Substack specifically on this topic - and, of course, how people stack dishwashers (a topic I know you have strong feelings about!) - is probably in order.

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Robert Goodman's avatar

In a bubble bath, in the sense of a foam-topped bath, the foaming material is very dilute. It's not like soap lather, and it's not strong enough to wash with. So it doesn't need rinsing unless you used far too much.

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