Mr. T. was a robust, 60ish man with a bushy grey mustache who spoke no English and little German. We communicated in grunts. During my "tare-a-pees" he must have grunted "Gute?" every three or four minutes. Whether it was a machine pummeling me, his hands fine tuning my ribcage, or jets of water and air attempting to bore through my body, his question was always the same: "Gute?" In my limited German I varied my replies among "Ja, Gute," "Sehr Gute," "Wunderbar" and "Schöne." Occasionally, I was even telling the truth.
A less enjoyable procedure employs a forbidding looking apparatus which the "interrogatee" faces while seated. Each leg from the knee down is placed into separate metal containers on the floor, and each arm into identical vessels about the size of roasting pans. These are affixed to a machine bristling with knobs and various digital counters, two of which were to rivet my attention over the next 10 minutes. The idea, apparently, is to increase circulation in the joints by directing alternating streams of warm and cold water into the four pans. My cycle was one minute of warm followed by seven seconds of cold. That's Alpine cold. It is a process that cannot possibly be designed to relax. Yes, at first it felt great, but that precious minute of warm water soon ticks away and the seven agonizing seconds of cold must be endured yet again.
A digital indicator which displayed the temperature of the water quickly commanded my full attention. My running thought commentary went something like this: "34, 35, 36, (Celsius), ah good, nice and warm but I could stand it a little hotter, oops, 30, 27, 20, 10, 7. Lord, that's cold."
After one or two cycles, like Pavlov's dogs, I began to anticipate the changes (o.k., o.k., so it took me a while to get the correlation between the numbers and the pain). But they never came close to breaking me. Fuss-und Armwechselbad was about $20.
