"Alice: Well, after this I should think nothing of falling down stairs." -Disney's "Alice in Wonderland"
Today I went to the баня/banya. What is a banya, you ask? Well a banya is the golf-course of Russian business. It is the local massage parlor, the meeting place, the “I’ve had a long day” place, the place you go drink vodka with friends. The banya is a bathhouse steeped in tradition. The banya is a uniquely Russian experience…
After a full day of classes at Smolniy I was absolutely delighted to meet up with a few friends and make our way to a banya. We split off into guys and gals, of course. Once at the ladies banya we stripped down (no skivvies necessary… yea, it raised our eyebrows too), threw on some tapochki, and put all of our shtuff in a locker.
The first room was the shower room. It was concrete except for the ceiling level windows that ran across one whole side of the building, letting in the gray afternoon light. The showers were simply metal faucets in the concrete wall but there was gloriously hot water (in my apartment, hot water controls you… not the other way around)! In the middle of the room were benches with large buckets for those who were less than fond of the metal faucets, and for soaking веники/veniks (bundles of birch branches). There was also a small, tall pool of ice cold water (enough for two adults to stand and be covered up to their chin). We showered down and made our way into the sauna.
The concrete room of the sauna itself is completely covered in wood. The walls are covered in wood, the door is wood, and there are wooden platforms to sprawl out on – naked as the day you were born of course. Oy. The other American students and myself, being… well being American, clung to our towels for dear life! The whole idea of buck naked was not appealing in the least. Our culture is so modest in that regard and I have no qualms with that. In fact, I rather missed it today at the banya. You can wear pasties to a pool party, but naked is just not ok. Well the women in the banya couldn’t care less about our American modesty. We looked foreign and lost all wrapped up in our towels, blinking in the extreme heat.
The sauna is ridonkulous. Russian banyas reach upwards of 90 degrees Celsius (Yup. That’s right. Around 200 Fahrenheit). It is absolutely stifling. Even the wood is hot to the touch! No matter how much we wanted to stay wrapped up in our towels there was just no way. We laid them out on the wood and sprawled out, trying just to cope with the heat. When in Rome, right?
Our very mannerisms must have looked ridiculous to the other women in the banya. One lady took pity on us and asked if we knew the ritual (uhh nope!). She patiently showed us what to do in broken ruslish. The ritual goes like this: the buckets on the benches are filled up water and dumped on the concrete floor in the banya to make a hot, steamy room, bucket after bucket. Some water is splashed onto the walls and the furnace as well. Most women wore a funny felt hat to protect the top of their head (it actually makes a huge difference). Then, and this was where I almost lost it, they began to flick themselves with the veniks from head to toe. It is said the extreme heat opens your pours and flicking the leaves of birch over your skin brings to the surface any impurities. There are many health benefits of the whole banya exercise. Wikipedia knows all of them, so you can go read up.
When we just couldn’t take the heat (or the veniks) any more, we jumped into the ice cold pool in the shower room to cool down, showered, and put on our beloved clothing at long last.
So. Ritual Thursday afternoon girl-talk session. Who’s in?
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