Баня

The banya: an experience, to be sure. So, imagine a big changing room full of wooden chests, and naked old ladies, talking to each other in fast Russian while squatting and sitting on the wooden seats, brushing out wet hair, cooling down and yelling at me (again) to drink my water so that they can have my bottle. I drank it. Now imagine that this room has a door on one side that opens into a big, steamy, slippery, wet, humid mess of showers, pipes, red people, buckets of water with birch branches soaking, water running, and heat permeating from the watery tile floors to the high ceilings. Take the stairway at the far end of this room, walking carefully as not to slip. As you climb the stairs you get the feeling that you know how the gingerbread man, or Shadrach, Mishach and Abednego felt (okay, not quite). It smells like wood sap, and the heat gets more intense the closer you get to the wooden door on the landing. You open the door and inside is a small room, maybe 15' by 15', there's a landing taking up half the space, (kind of like a deck) with three broad steps leading up, it's semi dark, people are sitting on the steps, others (the brave ones), are over by the oven (super huge and hot: a fire with hot rocks in it- water is thrown over the rocks so that the heat in the room is not completely a dry heat), some are beating themselves, or being beaten by other people with the wet branches. We walk in, find a place on the bench, sit down, hunch over and try to breathe. This was the hardest part. The intense heat around you makes you feel like you are getting a high-speed sunburn. After about a minute, maybe from your body trying to keep up with cooling you down, or maybe because it was so hard to breath that you end up rationing your breaths-- Whatever the case, after about a minute your heart rate speeds up and you feel like you might faint. There were claims among the group that two of them made it eleven minutes. I don't want to say that it's not true, but I'm skeptical; I don't think I made it past three. After you leave the oven you go back into the anteroom and pour cold water over yourself, we didn't do snow, cause there isn't any, but maybe sometime. Some dude came in with his ladder and changed a lightbulb. From there you can take a break, or go back in a many times as you want. Some people stay for a few hours. I was exhausted after three times. I guess you get acclimated-ish to it if you've done it all your life, but it just made me feel like a frail American :) Although it wasn't my favorite, I'll probably still go back at least one more time (we have “banya night” once every two weeks), and I think, if you have the chance, you should try it, too!