Authentic Shanghai Spa Massage Experience

Nicholas and I decided to try one of the more authentic Chinese spa experiences, so we went to the recommended China Rits CEO Club. It is a 24-hour club where apparently anyone can come in and enjoy the facilities, which include a restaurant and bar, jacuzzi, steam room and lots of rooms for foot massage and body massage. There were absolutely no English speaking people there and all their literature was in Chinese. Somehow we were able to get across that we wanted to each have a foot massage and a body treatment.

I was escorted to the women’s locker area and shown to the shower, before I was given some pajama-like outfit which was what everyone else was wearing also. I ended up being taken down numerous corridors (there must have been 50 or more places for people to get foot massages and another 30 or so massage rooms) into a massage room with two massage tables. Since there was absolutely no way of communicating with my therapist I decided to just go with the flow. What ended up happening was they brought Nicholas into the room also – either they didn’t realize he was my son (step son actually) which I will take as a compliment – or perhaps they thought this is the arrangement we wanted. Anyway we laughed and decided to give it a go. Both of us ended up having a therapist work on our feet while another therapist worked on the rest of our bodies. All of this lasted a delightful 2 hours.

I figured out we had 8 hours of massage between the two of us and our final bill was $200 total. Not bad at all for us American travelers and a common price for city CEO’s in Shanghai.