Night at the banya

I love to have authentic cultural experiences - times when you can experience a culture as it really is, not in an overtly tourist setting. Asados at our church in Argentina, eating at the traditional Japanese restaurant the last time I was in Tsukuba, or the time my dad and I went on the two-day-long boat ride through the rain forest in Costa Rica.

This is my third trip to Russia, and I don’t think I can say I’ve truly had a Russian cultural experience until now. And this particular experience would probably qualify as one of the most bizarre I’ve had anywhere. I should warn you that the rest of this post might qualify as PG-13, so proceed at your own risk. Even so, I can promise you that every word of it is absolutely true.

On Tuesday night I was invited to the banya, which is a Russian spa or sauna. I’d been warned about some of the strange practices that take place at the banya, but they were even more weird than I’d thought. First I walked into the antechamber - kind of like a dressing/relaxation room. You know how you go to the gym and you’re in the locker room and there’s always that one guy who walks around completely naked with no shame? Okay, now imagine that there are ten guys in the room, and they’re all THAT GUY. Let me clarify for you here: there were ten guys, and they were all COMPLETELY NAKED. I was sort of ready for some nudity, but I don’t think you can ever be completely ready to see something like that.

The next thing I noticed was the smell: a combination of male body odor and fish. These Russian dudes (not known for their grade-A personal hygiene to begin with) were just sitting around sweating and eating smoked fish. And I’m not talking about nice little smoked salmon strips like you might put on a bagel, I’m talking about whole smoked fish: heads, tails and everything. These guys would cut the fish into pieces with knives or just rip the meat apart and then suck it off the bones. Now, this could’ve been a very manly experience if it’d been venison or bacon they were eating, and they hadn’t been completely naked.

Let me clarify something else from my last paragraph: they were SITTING around sweating and eating. A couple of them had towels on, but most of them were just sitting on wooden chairs or (I’m totally serious here) a vinyl covered chaise sofa. The butt-germ ramifications of this experience alone are staggering to consider. Due to the high humidity and the moisture from the sauna itself, everything in this room is damp: the chairs, the table, the floor, the fish, EVERYTHING.

I decided to “go European” and stripped down to my… well, my nothing. So I suppose I was Naked Guy #11 here, although I did keep my towel nearby. And so help me, I didn’t sit on the vinyl.

As strange as all this may seem, it only gets weirder. After we got undressed, we moved into the sauna itself. Given that Houston between July and September technically is a sauna, the artificial-sauna experience is not one I’m very familiar with. We stepped into the sauna and it was hot, considerably hotter than any other I’d been in. There were about five other guys already in there, and it wasn’t very big to begin with, so it took a considerable amount of concentration to move to an open seating place without there being any, shall we say, touchage. I sat down and proceeded to not think about how much my nostrils hurt just trying to inhale. Our host, a very interesting fellow named Valeri, tried to explain how the banya experience works. Since his English is rather poor and he was already fairly sauced by this point, understanding what he was saying took far more effort than I was willing to expend in a sauna that was (I’m not exaggerating here) around 200 degrees F. After sitting in the hot-bath for a few minutes, we were to run back out into the room and jump into a pool of water. This pool was maybe six feet long and six feet deep. I’d love to say that it was a nice warm hot-tub, but it was just a tile-lined tub of VERY cold water. So after five minutes or so of sauna-ing, jumping into this tub of water was one of the most physically shocking experiences of my life. After this, I was instructed to return to the sauna for another round of “Life as a Microwave Burrito.”

Seriously, I still haven’t gotten to the weird part. Valeri came back into the sauna carrying a handful of "venik," dried birch branches. He then made me stand up while he whipped my back with the branches. Had everyone in the sauna not been undergoing the same “therapy,” I might have felt very violated. Instead, I felt only moderately violated. Then, he had me turn around while he whipped my chest with the branches. Supposedly the branch-whipping brings the toxins out of the skin. I think it’s just an excuse to beat other guys with sticks. It got even more bizarre when he started yelling: he’d slap me a couple of times with the branches, then let out a long yell, then whip me some more.

After a few minutes of me sitting in the heat, being beaten with branches by a naked Russian guy and wondering how I’d gotten myself into this particular situation, I was instructed to run back out and jump into the pool. This process repeated itself several times; over the course of the evening I did the sauna/ice-bath combo about four times. Keep in mind that the first thing everyone did after sweating in the hothouse was to jump into the pool. The pool of standing, non-recycling water. So by the end of the evening, the water had taken on a lovely, gray, Russian man-sweat mistiness.

After doing this a couple of times, I started to feel uncomfortable in the sauna. Not like “hey, why am I spending my evening with a bunch of naked guys?” uncomfortable, more like “hey, I’m starting to feel light-headed and over-heated” uncomfortable. I walked back out to the antechamber, sat down, and measured my heart rate at 120 beats per minute.

After a while, we all re-gathered in the antechamber and Valeri suggested we re-hydrate… by drinking beer. Of course, any modern Western medical practitioner will tell you that the best way to get fluids and minerals back into your body is by consuming alcohol. I had half a glass of beer, poured out of a two-liter plastic bottle, that tasted like a combination of Miller Lite and horse sweat. We eventually got dressed again and went out to the bar area where - you guessed it - we started to drink again. I managed to get by with drinking only two vodka shots. They broke out the snacks: bread, fish, and some sort of pureed fish paste in a can that my coworker compared to the delicate flavors of Fancy Feast. This went on until 11:30 at night - drinking, eating, attempting to understand the slurred speech of drunken Russians trying to speak English, and attempting to understand the slurred speech of drunken Americans trying to speak English. Finally, we managed to slip away - by which I mean we managed to outrun Valeri, who was coming after us to sing one more cheer.

So in summary, I’d have to rate this as one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had. It’s one that will be funny in time, but for now is just strangely creepy.