Being the European education of an American spa lover, in which Dana Dickey surrenders to the therapies of water—from the subterranean to the Mediterranean. Who says old Europe has nothing to teach us?

Two strong-armed women hustled my legs into a large black plastic bag. One of them fastened the top of it tight around my midsection—I was naked from the waist down—then inserted the nozzle of a hose that spewed carbon dioxide, inflating the bag. Cold air jetted over my lower quarters. "Now we leave, twenty minutes," one of my nurses announced as she tossed a rough wool blanket over me and flipped off the light on her way out—plunging me into darkness in the basement of a hotel in the mountains of Bohemia. I lay there feeling the blood vessels around the cinch pulse. The treatment, known variously as a dry carbon dioxide bath and as bagging, was intended to increase circulation and fertility. It seemed instead to be cutting off my blood flow and made me feel about as sexy as trash in a curbside heap.

I'd crossed the pond to explore the one part of the European lifestyle that, oddly, Americans have yet to experience in any numbers—Continental spa-going—even though it seems the next logical step. After all, U.S.-based foodies have adopted the philosophy of Slow Food that they learned in Italy, dieters read books on how to eat like slender French women, oenophiles pursue the peerless Burgundian pinots, fashionistas beat a path to boutiques like Colette in Paris, antiques buyers swarm London's Portobello Road, and sporty types pedal ecstatically over the Alps and the Pyrenees. But our ever-growing swarm of facial fanatics and mud-pack maniacs—myself included—know next to nothing about European treatments. Surprising, since in my experience spa-goers are among the most demanding consumers: We want the latest treatment, and we want it done right.

So fearlessly I flew east. I planned to work my way across Europe, taking in Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, and Greece. The common thread was water, since water treatments of infinite variety are at the heart of European spa-going. This is where it all began, more than two thousand years ago, in those salacious Roman baths. But the word spa, in its modern sense, has an elusive background. One theory is that it is the short form of the word espa, which is Walloon for "fountain." Another is that it originated with a proper name: Spa, the spring-fed Belgian town founded in 1326 when an ironworker discovered a hot spring there that cured his rheumatism. Another account has the term coming from the Latin, an acronym for salus per aquum, Nero's directive for "health through water." Whichever story is true, water is l'ancienne vague in European spa-going, and I was going to find out what it could do for me, a typical stressed-out American.

BERLIN
FLOATING WITH WHALES—THE TEUTONIC NEW WAVE
In a kind of reverse chronology, I began in Berlin, seeking the shock of the new. In this resurrected capital city of PoMo architecture and teenage disco parties called love parades, what could one expect but a disco spa?