Hot Hot Hot

Today is Women’s Day in Russia, and it seems to me that it’s turned out to be quite popular and widely celebrated. I bought my host mom some flowers, and she bought me a little box of chocolates. People are selling flowers on the streets, and every other person you pass on the street is carrying flowers. It almost seems that there are more flowers and gift giving on this holiday than on Valentines day. It makes me really happy that this holiday is celebrated as much as it is in this country (GIRL POWER). With that said, I’d like to send all my ladies some nice virtual flowers (and a big hug) from the motherland. <3

To celebrate women’s day (not really, we just kind of planned it randomly), me, Beryl, Fabi and Jackie decided to go to the banya. I’ve never been in any sauna before, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect and how I would react to it. We all wore bathing suits, but we were the only ones (we were going to stick out anyway, as usual). The banya was filled with mostly older, naked women, and at one point Beryl said, “I think I understand more about the human body now than I ever have...” I laughed nervously, agreed, and said that I wish I didn’t know. 

The banya consisted of two major sections: the actual hot room itself, and then another room filled with showers, tables with buckets on them, faucets, and a small pool filled with ice water (minus the ice). When you first walk into the banya (from here on out I will refer to the hot room as the banya), on your left there are wooden stairs/levels where some women were sitting or lying down. To the right there were more levels and a loft, where a flock of old women were beating and whipping each other and themselves with some sort of leafy branches... You could hear the slapping of the leaves and twigs on their bodies, and after a while the leaves accumulated on the wooden floorboards (well, the whole room is wooden). 

Walking into the banya was what I imagine walking into Mordor would be like. I took a few steps in, went up a level or two of left stairs/platform, only to find that it got SO much hotter as you went up, and then the next thing I know my neck felt prickly and stingy. Three seconds later it felt like my neck was being burned. It took me an additional few seconds before I realized, like a frickin’ vampire, that my silver necklace had gotten so hot so quickly that it was singing my neck. I got out of there as fast as I could, and took off my necklace and rings in the locker room. When I returned, we all sat down on the first level on towels, and proceeded to bake, sweat, and swelter. It only took a few minutes before my face must have turned beet red, and beads of sweat accumulated all over my body. It was definitely uncomfortable at first, but after a while you got used to breathing in such hot, somewhat constricting air, and you just kind of dealt with it. That is, until you just couldn’t even do that anymore. 

When you felt like you had sweated enough, you were supposed to go shower off, and if you wanted to after that, pour a bucket of cold water over your head or dunk in the small pool of freezing cold water. I rinsed off in the shower quickly, and then decided to submerge myself in the pool. To be straightforward, this pool was insanely cold. It must be as cold as the water in Maine is right now (after a dunk later on in our banya session as I was underwater for that one second or two my mind couldn’t help but wonder to the scene in the Titanic when Leo and Kate were floating on a raft or whatever... god that would suck). Despite all this, and the fact that I was always told as a kid not to go straight from a hot tub to a normal pool because it would stop my heart, I decided to go ahead with it. I took my weird croc-like sandals off, climbed up the slippery ladder and down a few steps on the other side before I figuratively crossed myself, said here goes nothing, and jumped in. The shock to my system, surprisingly, wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It was all so fast and my body temperature was all so screwed up from the banya anyway that it probably didn’t know what to do with itself. Even so, I got out of there as fast as possible, and headed right back into the banya, where I sat down and felt the heat engulf my refreshed, cool skin. 

It’s hard to describe how it feels to repeat that process: sweat until you feel uncomfortable in the banya, rise off in the shower, jump into ice water, and then return back to the banya, but it was undoubtedly nice. There’s something that feels good about suffering in the heat voluntarily... I don’t know. What I can tell you though, is that I feel SO GREAT right now. My skin feels soft and while I am slightly sleepy and lacking energy, I feel pretty rejuvenated. I would definitely do it again (I hope we go back again; it was only like $10 for 2 hours), and the next time I go I will at least know what to expect. 

Okay, when I wrote this post a few days ago I originally had a large segment on how I felt about the events in Ukraine right here, but after thinking things through, I think it might be best to delete that part.