Moscow Journal #04

Beginning of the fourth journal entry
For this journal entry, I am going to use a slightly different format. Instead of a diary where I record happenings and impressions on a day by day basis, today I am just going to string together a series of small stories and observations. Why the difference? Because there are only so many ways I can say "got up, looked for a job, hung out at the drugstore". (OK - that was a rather obscure reference to somebody's comedy routine; of course, I can't remember whose right now.)

The Morning Ritual
When I'm away from home, I usually establish a daily ritual that consists of some aerobic exercise (running, riding the stationary bike or some laps in the pool) followed by, hopefully a steam bath or sauna. I prefer to complete this in the morning since you never quite know how the day is going to progress and what time you'll make it back to the hotel.
Russia is famous for its banya (basically a sauna) so I was full of confidence I would be able to establish my "regular" regime. On the first day, I expected the sauna to be attached to the men's locker so I came to the gym just with my workout clothes, a towel and a bath robe (courtesy of the hotel). Much to my disappointment, the banya was not physically attached to the locker room; instead, it was out by the pool. I didn't feel like schlepping back upstairs for the proper attire, so I simply showered and returned to the room.

The next attempt at solidifying the routine was the following day, a Sunday. This time, I came prepared with my bathing suit . As an added bonus, on the way to the health club, I passed through the lobby, where they were not only serving few coffee and tea (which I didn't feel like having before working out), but they also offered complimentary cookies! Needless to say, until the beginning of Lent, the first part of the routine consisted of snagging a few cookies for a light post-workout breakfast of tea and biscuits back in the room.

Back to the health club. After an hour or so on the treadmill followed by a thorough shower, it was on with the bathing suit and out to the pool. And then some. Turns out the sauna was up one flight of stairs and just past the massage room, at which point there were actually two sets of rooms: one for women and the other for men. Ah - I thought it was a unisex unit since it was outside of the locker rooms; that's why I brought my bathing suit. I entered the men's suite, which consisted of a few rooms: first the outer room, which housed the water cooler/heater (the same unit provides both cold and boiling hot water, from different spigots - why don't we have these back home?). To the left of the outer room were the showers, and just past the showers the sauna. Back into the outer room and through the other door brings you into the "post-sauna" room (or "relaxing room"), which housed a total of 7 chaise lounges, with 4 along one wall and 3 along the other, along with a table with tea and little jars of honey and jam.

As it was fairly early on a Sunday morning, no one else was around and I had the whole place to myself. I left my solitary towel on the bench outside the sauna, popped into the sauna to get the bucket, filled it to the rim with some cold water and dashed back into the sweat box. After ladling a few helpings of water onto the hot stones, started the timer on my watch and sat down on the bench to let the hot steam settle down on me. Aaah...

Several minutes later, it was time to add a bit more water and let the hot air overtake me again. Aaah...

In a traditional banya, at some point during the sweat phase, you would perform self-flagellation with a set of wet young birch twigs. This sounds a bit masochistic and painful, and I must admit I never actually quite performed this part of the process. The theory behind the birch beating is it helps to improve the circulation by bringing more blood to the surface of the skin. However, this last winter in New York, my eldest sister treated the siblings to a session at a Russian-style banya in NYC and they offered a similar treatment; in that version, the therapists used branches of an oak tree (with the leaves still attached) and lightly dusted the client for about 3 minutes on a side, and strangely enough, it felt wonderful. Maybe the birch branches would produce a similar sensation - I still have a couple of days left - maybe I'll got birch branch hunting tonight.

You can only stay in the sauna for so long, and after ten minutes, I was ready for phase two: a rinse in cold water. (In a "traditional" Russian, and I think Scandinavian version, too, the second phase is usually a run into a snow bank; I was extremely grateful this sauna was on the second floor without an egress to the outside!) As I think I mentioned before, this temperature shock is supposedly very beneficial to the one's health (assuming you don't have a pre-existing heart condition.)

Finally onto the last phase: the resting. Prepared a cup of green tea and plopped down onto a chaise lounge to allow my body to come back down to room temperature, which took about twenty minutes or so. If I had enough time, I would have repeated the whole process again, but I had plans to meet Alexey at 10am, so I needed to return to my room to get ready.
On Monday, I started my ritual as normal (this time only 30 minutes on the bike as I had to leave the hotel by 9am to start my trek into work and you know I wasn't cutting the sauna portion short) and then walked up to the sauna suite in my bathing suit with my towel in hand. This time, it turns out I was not the only occupant, and this is when I discovered the proper "attire" for the sauna. Since the units were segregated by gender, all the other partakers were "au natural" and sitting on towels. Since I only had 1 towel, I could not quite do this, so I kept my bathing suit on (just to have something between me and the hot boards). Most of the other guys also had something on their heads (either a special "banya hat" or simply a towel wrapped around the head) because the steam from the water can get a bit overpowering when the water is first ladled onto the stones and it really hits you in the crown. Again, not something I could do with just one towel.

My timer popped and I exited the sauna, performed the pulse-quickening cold water rinse and entered the "relaxing" room. Now I really suffered from towel envy! Here I was with my single towel where all the other guys had four or five towels each. Seems like the norm consisted of at least two towels to cover the chaise lounge. Once you settled onto the chair, you then draped one more towel over your lower portion with the fourth draped around your shoulders and chest, and a couple of guys even used a fifth piece to cover their heads so by the end, they were covered in a towel cocoon. And here I was with a single towel!

Not much I could do to remedy the situation as the towels were all the way downstairs and back in the check-in counter. Slightly embarrassed and very aware of the lack of towels under and around me, I completely my cool down and calmly returned to the locker room.
By Tuesday, I had the routine down pat. Following the work-out, I wondered up to the sauna suite with my towels and bath robe; in a very minor attempt at being green, I only used 3 large towels and 2 small ones: 1 small one to sit on, the other small one to cover my head, 2 to line the chaise lounge and 1 to cover myself with during the cool down. After a few days, I seemed to notice a pattern: the older the person, the more towels he used - maybe that was my true motivation for cutting down to 3 large and 2 small. Also noticed the younger kids (based on my large sample size of two) didn't quite get the routine and were almost as towel challenged as I was on my first foray into sauna.

My Sweettooth is Genetic!
As you probably already know, I have a bit of a sweettooth (is that the understatement of the year or what?). From what I can tell, all Russians enjoy their sweets. During my first visit back in 1982, I figured the Russians consumed so much sugar (in tea, chocolates, cakes, ...) because they had to prop up the Cuban economy. However, maybe it was the other way around and they exerted their influence into that country to secure a sugar source for their population.
Even now, the Russians are incredibly proud of their chocolate. Since I knew they enjoyed chocolate and tea, I decided to bring over some Ghirardelli chocolate and Harney and Sons tea (their shop is in Millerton and is worth the 30 minute drive from Hopewell) as a gift for the group. Yesterday I finally brought the goods into work and set them up on the cabinet near my work station in this open floor plan office. The person next to me took a piece of the dark chocolate, and without even sampling it, asked me, "Don't you like Russian chocolates?" While this struck me as incredibly rude, I'm writing it off to lack of fluency in English. By the end of the day, all the chocolate was gone, so I guess they were acceptable.

Back to the banya. In the "relaxing room", the occupants enjoy a cup of tea (the selection consists of only decaf varieties) and some sweets. The table is decked with little jars of honey and jam. Some guys put the contents of the jar (or two!) into the little paper cup with their tea. Other guys just eat the honey or jam straight out of the jar! OK - these are little jars (the individual size you sometime see in restaurants), but they don't consume the contents of just one. The normal serving size (again, this is based on a sample size of 5 or 6 regulars, so maybe I just sweat with the sweetest) is 2 or 3 jars.

What a relief - now I know it is not my fault I have such a craving for sweets - it is in my genes!

Banya Talk
On a slightly related topic, there seem to be basically two categories of banya goers: those who talk and those who are silent. Regardless of which one you are, you still utter the customary greetings when you enter the sauna (something along the lines of "Greetings - have a good sweat") and once you leave the relaxing room, you utter the normal departing phrase ("Congratulations on your sweat" or "Have a good one"). Some guys actually take a nap while in the relaxing room, where most guys engage in some small talk. However, there is one guy, we'll call him The Judge, who acts almost like a sauna arbitrator. I can't really follow the conversations, but I can catch bits and pieces, and it seems as if The Judge is always offering his advice on the problems and predicaments of his follower banya-goers.

Just a couple of days ago, there were only three of us in the relaxing room: The Judge was in the middle with me on one side and some guy fast asleep (well, at least snoring) on the other side. By the way The Judge fidgeted around, I could tell it was killing him not having anyone to talk to! Eventually, he resorted to waking up the snorer just to fulfill his need to pontificate.
On another occasion during Maselnitsa (the week before Lent), I could follow along with the conversion, which not surprisingly, eventually turned to religion and customs. The Judge informed everyone that Maselnitsa was originally a pagan customer (which is true as many Christianity adopted many local customs to ease the introduction of the faith), and then they started to talk about faith, in general. Everyone agreed that some faith was needed, and I was aching to ask how they acted upon that faith during the communist era, but I didn't want to seem like a rude foreigner. Then they started to debate the date when Prince Vladimir brought Christianity to his land (called Rus at the time) and since they were off by a few hundred years, I finally chimed in with the date I remembered from school: 988.

Then the conversation took an unexpected turn. Before I knew it, The Judge commented on the composition of Lenin's Politburo and Central Committee (inner circle). Over 90% of the members were Jewish, maybe as much as 95%, and even Lenin himself was at least a quarter Jewish. And no one explicitly stated it, but you knew they were all thinking it. Which leads to the next topic...

To be PC or not be PC
Being Politically Correct isn't quite a necessity here. As we heard in the banya, anti-Semitism is still alive and well here in Russia. I'm not saying all Russian are anti-Semites as I am only working with a sample size of 6 and only one person made the comment, however, I was just surprised to hear it all (especially in the presence of an obvious foreigner). Xenophobia is fairly strong, too. The Duma passed some laws recently that limit the number of foreigners that are allowed to operate stalls in markets and kiosks along the street (from what I remembered, the limit was dropped to a maximum of 50% allotted for non-Russians and that number is going to be lowered later in the year). Furthermore, I've heard cases of, and was witness to a few incidents, where the police harass a person for his papers (every one needs to carry proper papers with them at all times, including foreigners; usually I lock my passport in the room safe, but this was the one place where I always have my passport with me).

At first I thought maybe I was over-reacting and projecting my preconceived notions onto a situation that might have other possible explanations. However, one day in the The Moscow Times (the English language daily newspaper delivered to the room every weekday), I came across an article about a Newsweek reported based in Moscow. One night, just about midnight, a bunch of hooligans approached the reporter and asked (I am paraphrasing here), "Don't you know Russia is only for Russians?" I'm not sure what made the reported stand out so readily (and from what I remember, his name sounded somewhat Russian), and I am not such what prompted him to respond as he did, but the reporter took a somewhat confrontation tone. I am not saying this justified the hooligan's behavior, but I think it isn't too surprising the verbal exchange progressed to a physical encounter. Don't worry - I'm not usually on the metro that late at night, and you can rest assured I won't strike a confrontational tone with drunken thugs.
In today's paper, there was another interesting article. A government official from Ingushetia was in town for a conference on energy tariffs. Before the event, he decided to visit his brother in northern Moscow, but he never made it that far; during the middle of the day, he was attacked outside of metro station Sukharevskaya and bludgeoned to death. Since all his valuables were still on him and he has an Asiatic appearance, the officials are treating this as another potential hate crime. The scary part is that this metro stop is one stop before mine, and I've walked around that neighborhood in search of Chinese and Japanese food.

On a more humorous non-PC note, almost every day I walked past an Italian restaurant called Il Patio. The first few days I was here, they were running a promotional campaign for some specials, and they called it The Mafia Grill.

Along similar lines, a couple of nights ago I ventured into a supermarket with a supposed large Asian section (it was on the second floor and I never made it up there), and the name of the place was Jappo.

I can't wait to see what they call a soul-food restaurant.

OK - I think I've rambled on enough for now.

End of the fourth entry.