Home (a brief description)

The old region of Zelenograd is, indeed, older. On the other hand, it's possibly more interesting and certainly doesn't lack for character...
I live on the first floor off a grimy, rubbish-strewn landing that's so poorly lit that I have to find the keyhole by touch. We all have rickety balconies, where everybody hangs their laundry out to dry (or rather, freeze), and every morning a man with a kind of beggar's pushcart comes wheeling by and collects the trash that people leave on the front stoop. The pipes on this side of town are above-ground (permafrost, I guess), and run along between buildings, occasionally rising up into an arch so that cars can drive under them. They're all so old and knobbly and gnarly that they look they're made out of paper mache, and during cold snaps they're blanketed in burlap to stop them freezing...During cold snaps also, you're liable to find migrant laborers out on the sidewalks, grimly chipping away the built-up layers of ice, snow, and sawdust (never salt!) that make street travel a little hazardous sometimes.

Then all you need are the babushka in knitted turbans and musty overcoats who shuffle up and down outside all day, eyes glued to their footing, and you have a distinctly Soviet image of life here in the fourth region...

On the other hand: high speed internet. Done Russian-style, of course, which means that a man came yesterday and fooled around with the circuit box out in the hall, drilled a hole in our ceiling above the door, ran about ten yards of ethernet cord (two separate cords of course, one for me and one for Shayla) through the hole, dragged them down the hall, and hooked one each into our laptops. I'm not kidding, an entire kindergarten class could play double-dutch jump-rope with the superfluous ethernet cord that's lying around our house now. Fortunately the dog restrains himself to eating my socks, and doesn't chew on the stuff...

(Central Prospekt - my bus stop)

We're on the edge of the forest here, and it's lovely to walk in the morning after a fresh snow when the drifts are all piled up among the birches and fir trees. One caveat: schoolkids have gym class (cross-country skiing) on the trails, so you have to be careful not to get run down by a flock of them when school is in session.
This picture (from Google Earth) shows Youth Square, where there's a movie theater and KFC-spinoff, on the very edge of town, with the forest stretching out behind it.

Moving Day

We knew it was coming, because our landlord, Vladimir, had been threatening to evict us for a month, and now the deadline to vacate was just 48 hours away. Problem was, nobody seemed to know where we were going, not even administrator Olga, who was supposedly responsible for finding us a new flat. For two weeks now she had responded to every inquiry by shrugging and saying, "Where will you live? You will live in box. Box at Kriyukovo Station."
Well, Olga is cryptic and difficult at her very best, but the larger problem, I guess, is that Zelenogradians are touchy about foreigners. There were apartments for rent all over the city, but no one ever called back after finding out that Americans would be their tenants.
Finally, on Saturday night, she telephoned to inform us that we would be moving the next day at 2 PM. Would Vladmir show up to help us with his big truck, as promised? No, apparently he'd been drunk when he offered that. But not to worry, Olga had hired us a taxi. One of Lena's friends. Or maybe Sasha's.
And where were we moving to?
Why, was it important?
Well, yeah.
Grudgingly, she confided that our new flat was in the fourth region, in the older district on the other side of the forest. The phone clicked off.
I packed my belongings by the simple expedient of shoving them in my suitcase, emptied all the kitchen supplies into a box (the flat was apparently furnished, but 'furnished' in Language Link terms means two spoons and a broken futon), and abandoned my sickly houseplant to the tender mercies of the downstairs babushka. There was one thing I couldn't pack or abandon though: my dog. The dog is an illegal refugee, but he's my dog, an amber-eyed beast like a little wolf, and I wasn't leaving him. So I texted Lindsay and arranged for her to come over early and smuggle him out. Then of course I had to stay up half the night talking to people on the Internet, because God forbid I might not have internet in our new flat…
Sunday dawned bright and clear. I spent the morning pacing around cramming the last things in my suitcase. The dog caught the general mood and dogged, excuse the term, at my heels, whining softly, until I made him go lie down. Then I stacked my boxes in the hall.
At 1, Lindsay showed up.
"You might as well hang out until it's time," Shayla said. "Olga's going to call us first anyway, when the taxi is coming."
Lindsay sat down on my futon to use the Internet for a while.
At 1:45 the door opened and Olga strode in. Without acknowledging me, she went directly into the kitchen, where Shayla was sitting.
"Uh, hi, Olga," I said. "Nice to see you –" and ducked into my room, pulling the door shut behind me.
"Christ!" I hissed at Lindsay. "She's here! Quick!"
She grabbed Volchik by his collar and hauled him out on the balcony. I shoved his leash and kibbles into a bag and threw it out after them.
"Hang on," Lindsay said. ''I need my cigarettes. In my coat pocket."
I picked up her parka. It weighed at least twenty five pounds. The pockets felt like dumbbells.
"What on earth do you have in here?"
"Oh you know, stuff. Change. Crayons. Teabags."
"Here, you look for them."
She found a cigarette and scratched Volchik behind the ears.
"OK, dude," she said. "I'll wait until you guys leave and then jet out of here."
I closed the balcony door and pulled the curtains shut, then went back out to the kitchen. Olga was wandering around, poking at things.
"The driver says, twenty minutes probably."
I exchanged agonized glances with Shayla.
"Then Shayla, I will give you keys to flat, you go over first with him, Lily and I will take the bus."
As always, her voice sounded indifferent and on the verge of slurring drunk. Olga is Tatar, and looks it, with her leather coat and two long black braids. She's a big fan of Stalin ("he wasn't a bad man – just misunderstood"), and rumored to hate Americans, because her husband left her for America. Or she left him and he left for America, there are conflicting stories. The only other time I'd met her, at another teacher's party months earlier, she'd spent the entire night vomiting into a sink, and then skipped home through the forest with us singing, 'Follow, Follow, Follow, the Yellow Brick Road,' – which left a lasting, but not entirely coherent, picture of her overall character.
Long minutes ticked by.
I had just tried to mitigate the awkwardness by offering to make everyone tea, when Olga's phone buzzed. She spoke quickly and then hung up.
"He's here now." She rounded on me suddenly. "Lily! Why are you not ready? Go! Go!"
She picked up a box from our stack and rushed out into the hallway. We scrambled after her.
The taxi was an ordinary Lada pulled up to the curb outside. The young driver grabbed things from us and shoved them into the trunk., then the back seat, then the front seat, until there was barely room for Shayla to squeeze in.
"OK," said Olga. "Shayla goes over. I go over. Lily, you stay because Vladmir is coming, half hour maybe, to look over his things. You wait here for Vladmir."
"Right," I said. "I'll do that."
They pulled away. I tore back upstairs and went to the balcony.
"Right, it's clear. Rock out of here."
"That was close," Lindsay said. "Why, why can't the back door be unlocked? Are you sure they're gone?"
"Yeah, but now the landlord's coming. Run!"
She grabbed Volchik's leash and they disappeared down the hall.
Alone suddenly I stared at the boxes still waiting to be moved. Then I decided to repack the teacups, but scarcely had I finished when the door opened and Vladmir came in, followed by a young couple with a toddler.
Vladmir was crazy all the way through. He had certain habits that were disconcerting in a landlord, like sneaking into our apartment during the day and leaving broken television sets in the corners, or suddenly showing up at 1649 School to demand to know why there was water on our bathroom floor, or blaming his tenants when the fridge caught fire. Now he stepped through the maze of our belongings, showing the apartment, or something.
The young couple seemed to feel a little awkward about it. The baby stumbled and stared. Like all Russian babies in winter, he was bundled up until he resembled a tiny Yuri Gagarin. What the hell were they doing here? I just tried to stay out of the way.
"Where's my other remote control?" Vladmir said. He shook it. "Why have you taken out the batteries?"
Then Olga came back, and he decided to make himself useful by throwing all our things into the hall and holding the elevator doors open until every single box was piled in.
Downstairs, all my neighbors were lined up to watch the spectacle. As we frantically scuttled back and forth (Vlad was still standing there with his finger on the hold button), the babushkas waved and called 'dosvedanya!'
Finally it was done. The driver drove away and Olga and I went over to catch the crosstown bus. A short ride later, we disembarked in front of Korpus 440 on the Central Prospekt. My new home was waiting....

Walking in Snow

The weather's been a little harsh here, so I've barely gone out, but yesterday, getting that old cabin fever feeling again, I bundled up and ventured into the blizzard. There are so few hours of daylight here; you have to steal what chances you have.
I walked through my neighborhood, crossed the main road. The snow was falling hard and the drifts made walls along the sidewalks – but at Oktoberskaya, people had tramped out a footpath leading downhill, away from the street towards the park and the forest. So I followed this path. I wasn't alone of course. Ahead of me an elderly man was walking with his wife, one in a big hat, the other in a long fur coat. Tromping along hand-in-hand in a blizzard on a Friday afternoon in January.
Love is funny and beautiful sometimes.
And other people – men mostly, but a few women – alone, pacing very slowly with their heads bowed and their hands behind their backs. They didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular. Just walking. I guess I too am one of the just-walkers…
So we went on this way, over a bridge and a frozen spillway to the shores of a broad basin all filled up with snow – Skolnoye Ozero, School Lake. There was a boathouse at the near end. I could just see the top of a beached pontoon boat sticking out of the drifts, and close by the lifeguard towers and changing huts of a swimming beach. There's something lovely and surreal about a beach in the snow, I don't know why.
Out on the ice a man had a little fire going in a can; he was crouched over a hole, ice-fishing, and nearby another group was doing the same. Where they had cleaned their fish there were bloodstains in the snow.
Then I had to step off the path to let a cross-country skier go by, but five minutes later I was ahead of him again – he wasn't a very good skier, and he'd tripped out of his skis.
Further down the lake there were other skiers, and some children tobogganing down the bank onto the ice. I passed a group having a picnic on a park bench. The two men were standing. The girl was on the bench, but crouched on the balls of her feet, not actually sitting, because of the Russian dread of cold surfaces…They had laid out a whole spread on the bench: sausages, vodka, a jar of pickles, and they didn't look up as I passed.
When I got to the very end of the lake, I stopped and looked back. Everything was hazy and monochrome in the falling snow – the low sky, the forest, the beach – and the small dark figures moving through the landscape made it seem like a Brueghel painting. Someone somewhere let off a firecracker. A flock of gray crows lifted from a pine, and a woman who had been pacing on her way paused, just for a minute, and looked around.
When it was silent again I realized I could hear the snow falling on my hat and shoulders.

Moscow journeys

Wednesday, the first day of our holiday break, and Lindsay's friend was flying in from Boston to visit. As it happened, he had chosen to arrive at Domodedovo, the most distant airport, all the way across the city from Zelenograd. Poor man, how could he possibly have known that getting to Domodedovo, and then back again, would take us 9 hours? Moscow is one the biggest cities in the world. Moscow is epic.
The snow was drifting down as we set off from Zelenograd at 11 AM, hopping onto a coach bus (marshruta) bound for the nearest Metro station, about an hour away. The roads were barely plowed, but Russian drivers are intrepid in any weather. A little fishtailing didn't cramp our driver's style at all. Lane dividers, psshhhtt. However, we were soon forced to a crawl, and then a standstill, as the highway wound around the mega-mall complex in Khimki, miles of furniture, electronics, Porsche dealerships, supermarkets, and most importantly, a massive Ikea store.
Lindsay chafed, imagining her friend leaving the airport to wander bemusedly through southern Moscow, but I was distracted watching all the people caught in traffic around us: a bespectacled man in a German truck, a driver smoking a cigarette in a sinister black car with smoked windows, girls with bleached hair and matching hooker boots, trudging through the slush, mallbound. Men sold jugs of antifreeze on the side of the road.
An hour and half behind schedule, we finally reached the Metro station and jumped on a southbound subway train. The car was crowded, but not oppressively so – until a babushka got aboard and took a shine to my corner. It was a primo spot, braced against the opposite doors, good handholds, all that, and by God she wanted it. So she stood in front of me, and every time the car lurched, she took it as an opportunity to adjust herself further into my space, treading on my feet twice. At last somebody else got off and I was able to move into a different spot. The babushka stepped triumphantly into the corner, like a rightful queen ascending the throne after years in exile.
On and on we went, crossing under Moscow.
Somewhere along the way, we had established that neither of us really knew where we were going. Inspection of the Metro wall map pointed to two options: Domodedovskaya Metro station, and a special train line running from Paveletski Rail station. Encouragingly, the latter led directly to the little airport symbol, so we opted for it, falling out of the subway into a stampede of people, all dragging children, suitcases, cryptic parcels piled on carts, etc, etc. Then we paid 250 rubles each (~ $8 USD) for tickets on the express airport train, exactly 10x more than your average autobus ticket. I was expecting a standard electric train, wooden benches, metal floors, but the Aerport Express turned out to be a luxury vehicle, with cushy seats and closed captioning TVs. Bossy loudspeaker voices reminded us, in both Russian and English, to mind our belongings and give up our seats to pregnant women. We weren’t even underway before a woman was rolling down the aisle with a shopping cart, selling bottled tea and the latest Dan Brown novel in translation. It felt like the beginning of a real journey. I was happy in my seat and fully ready to just set out and cross the whole country. On reflection, it seemed a little lame that we were just going to pick up the friend and then trek back to Zelenograd.
45 minutes later, following an all-too brief trip through factory yards and snowy birch forests, we cast up at Domodedovo. Everything was under construction and International Arrivals lay on the other side of a labyrinth of snow fencing. Finally, however, we made into the terminal where we hiked, and hiked, until at last we ran into Lindsay's friend hiking the other direction. He was hugely relieved to see her. When she hadn't been there to meet him, he had handed the airport workers a little card she had emailed him earlier. It said: I am lost. I cannot speak Russian. I cannot find my friends. Please help me. First the workers had laughed their heads off, then they took pity on him and escorted him around the terminal, searching.
On the way back we skipped the expensive train in favor of a marshruta to Domodedovskaya metro stop. This was a mistake. The traffic was even worse. For two hours we crawled along the highway towards Moscow. I read the billboards: Fly to Bangkok from 15000 rubles. Fly to Tashkent. Fly to London. Fly away, fly away. The sun went down and the snow fell harder.
At last we came to Domodevoskaya. But here we met another problem: none of us had had a bite to eat all day, and all of us needed the facilities. Across the street, a sign beckoned us: a crossed fork and spoon, lit up in neon ten feet tall. Bingo.
The facilities were outside, a row of porta-johns on the snowy sidewalk. Now, lots of countries make you pay for your convenience, but Russians have it down to an art form: every row of toilets has its own babushka, who stakes out the last booth as her own: she has an electric light, blankets, a teakettle, cleaning supplies. You go to this woman, hand her 15 rubles, and avail yourself of one of the other booths. It's a little bit awkward and pretty damn cold, but they're always clean. In many ways it's a very practical system.
The diner was a barebones waystation, staffed by a lanky hawkfaced man and a Kazakh girl in a purple dress, who kept fixing her hair in the mirror. When he spotted us, the man bounded over.
When Lindsay started to order, he interrupted her, laughing, waving his long arms around.
"Speak English!" he said in English. "Or maybe French?" he added in Russian.
"Speak English?" Lindsay said. "Really?"
"No of course not," he said. "Does it look like I do?"
Thoroughly confused, she finished the order in Russian, three cheese sandwiches, three Finnish beers. The man took note and bounded off again. We took off our hats and gloves, tried to get warm.
The sandwiches were bad, but I really liked that place, I don't know why.
Then we rode all the way back under Moscow, reached our metro stop, dragged the friend and his luggage through heavy traffic, and leapt aboard the marshruta to Zelenograd. Standing room only this time.
Naturally, we got caught in traffic.


(note: just for the record, I didn't take this picture. It was on someone else's blog: http://havemorecake.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html and I borrowed it purely for illustrative purposes)

Communication

"We are living in the future
I'll tell you how I know
I read it in the paper
Fifteen years ago
We're all driving rocket ships
And talking with our minds
And wearing turquoise jewelry
And standing in soup lines…"

-John Prine, 'Living in the Future'

I had what you might call a Jewish Grandmother kind of weekend (fixed latkes, bought a woolly sweater), but there was one heart-racing moment: Sunday night, when I thought my sketchy Russian Internet had finally given out. Sunday night, when I realized (not for the first time) that I love the Internet more than whiskey, ice cream, and puppies. If some perverse Soviet landlord offered me a household Sophie's choice: hot water or Ethernet? – I would go out and buy a big kettle to bathe in. No question.
The 21st century, so far, is distinctly lacking in awesomeness. I came along far too late to be shattered by the end of 60's idealism, but even I can see that. Where are the hover-cars? Where are the eerily intelligent and benevolent aliens? Where are the honest politicians? Anyway, the Internet is one of the few things that are inarguably futuristic and awesome in 2009. This morning, without even getting out of bed, I checked my mail, read the newspapers of three countries, admired my friends' vacation photos, and listened to some music. Later on I'll visit the forums at Dave's ESL café and see if any other English teachers, scattered across the globe, have come up with cool ideas for teaching the irregular past simple to bored 13 year olds. I'm sure they have.
Writing this now makes me feel a bit guilty for being so irked at Skype last night. I was talking to my parents and the connection/sound quality was lousy. I think the exact way I put it was: "Your picture is chopped to bits and your goddamn microphone sounds like you put it in a tin box and dropped it down an artesian well." It was so bad that we had to hang up.
But 'bad,' I now realize, is relative. What did people gripe about before email, bandwidth, international cell phones, etc?
490 BC: Message received. Would have sent him back, but unfortunately, he's dead.
1805 AD: Dear President Jefferson. Bad weather in the Bitterroots. Had to eat the horses. Send help if you receive this letter in the next two years.
1917: About those battle plans, Lieutenant…I think the carrier pigeon got held up in a wheat field…
Put things in perspective. Still, I love hand-written letters, even if they're impossible to receive/send in the black hole of the Russian postal system. Escape velocity can be achieved, but only for a price (insured airmail by European FedEx). Maybe I should handwrite letters and then scan them into my computer and email them. Whoa dude! Too trippy!
Sadly, I don't have a scanner. And the babushkas outside are all bundled up, wading into the snow to sweep the streets with birch-twig brooms, just like they're done for untold centuries. So maybe we're not living in the future after all. S'ok. This era suits me fine. Just as long as I have my Internet...

Rockwell Thanksgiving

In direct contrast to the weird debauchery of their previous party, the girls were hosting Thanksgiving dinner, complete with pie and cranberry sauce. Jeff was in Moscow for the weekend and I'd even made a coffee cake. It was a bleak November day but the pink kitchen was cozy and bright. Everyone was fussing around, putting dishes together, getting everything ready for the guests to arrive. Jeff made eggnog, Jenny and I fixed deviled eggs, Caroline cooked mashed potatoes. I hadn't seen much of them since the end of the internship, so we had a lot of catching up to do.
At 8 PM we laid out the spread and people started showing up, mostly Russian friends, who all refused to touch the dinner until somebody had gone out to a produkti and procured vodka for them to drink with it. It was a lovely meal, albeit culturally divided by those who understood green bean casserole and those who did not, never mind the grisly meat gelatin and cheesy mayonnaise ham rolls that Grisha provided.
After dinner, Oleg brought out his electric guitar and everybody sat around in the living room, listening as he and Jenny sang English pop songs. A little later on, Lindsay and Ayden showed up, and it wore on as really the nicest and most mellow kind of evening. Except for a glass of eggnog, I didn't drink much; I just wasn't in the mood. The Russians, of course, drank steadily, at one point going out in search bigger plastic cups and more bottles.
3 o'clock in the morning found the men in the living room, singing a wobbly rendition of 'Yesterday.' That song always makes me sad, so I went out to the kitchen, where I found Jeff, Heather, and Lindsay sitting on the floor (the chairs had all been taken out to the party room). Jeff was teaching them to count in Chinese. I joined them by the table, and as we talked, people retreated to sleep, the Russians departed, and the night went gently away.
Noon next day found us fixing tea, helping the girls clean up, making plans to meet up later at Mayakovskaya downtown. Since it was my birthday, we were going to revisit the English bookstore and then have a celebratory coffee at the Starlite diner.
I left with Lindsay and Ayden and again we ended up in a kitchen, Ayden's this time, sitting dreamily around the table eating rice and listening to a Shostakovich concerto. It was another gray twilight, hooded crows cawing in the trees outside, lights blinking on across the alley. We got so lost that the whole evening might have disappeared that way, except for Jeff and the girls waiting downtown. So we ventured out again.
Mayakovskaya, the theatre district, was crowded with people strolling in their beautiful evening clothes. The Starlite diner was full of milkshakes and expats, and I bought a visual Russian-English dictionary at the Anglia shop. A nice night out in Moscow. But if I think about this weekend, I have to say that at its heart it was a kitchen weekend.
And really, what more can you ask on Thanksgiving?

Banya Stories

"You are going to this, right?" Lindsay said on Friday afternoon. We were sitting in the teacher's room, drinking tea. "I'm not going to be the only non-naked person there?"
"Glyn said there'd be a room," I said. "Next to the pool and the sauna. We could hang out there and, you know, drink vodka. And keep our clothes on."
It's traditional, when visiting a Russian bathhouse, to get both undressed and inebriated, but this was a coworker's event, and thus not so much a question of modesty as of survival. The banya visit had been in the works for a long time, and now Masha, one of the Russian teachers, had apparently rented us one. From 11 PM on Friday to 5 AM on Saturday, we would have the run of the place: dry room, sauna, and all.
"I don't know how you rent a bathhouse," I said. "I guess we'll find out."
"Yeah, that's really why I want to go," Lindsay said. "Just to see what it's like…"
At 10 PM, we finished teaching and left work, acquired initial refreshments from the produkti, and met Glyn, the Welshman, at the bus stop. Glyn led us on a vodka-acquiring mission, and then we piled into the #3 bus and rode to the very edge of town, where we found Josh, Masha, and a handful of Russian friends waiting on a muddy path under the trees. Mustered, we walked through the dark to what appeared to be a warehouse. The inside didn't give this impression the lie: on the contrary, there was a large truck, some tools, and a stack of bricks.
"Bricks!" Lindsay hissed at me. "Fucking bricks! Where are we?"
"No idea," I said. "And how does this always happen to us?"
While we were having this philosophical debate, the others were knocking on a metal door in the wall. After a long pause, the door opened on a young woman in uniform, who beckoned us into a shadowy lobby. Masha explained our reservation, and the woman led us through the dark into a cavernous space that turned out to be a mirrored dressing room. A staircase led downwards, presumably to the banya rooms. The Russians began to take off their coats and scarves in a way that struck me as ominous. Lindsay clutched the lapels on her penguin jacket.
"I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it!"
We sidled toward the staircase, but Masha stopped us.
"Take off your street shoes. You might get big fine."
She indicated a sign on the wall forbidding, among other things, shoes and birch twigs. (Birch twigs, of course, are what Russians traditionally use to flog each other in the banya).
I took off my shoes, put on some guest sandals, lest I be rendered sterile by the contact between my bare feet and the cold floor*, and at last went downstairs.
Well, Glyn wasn't kidding when he said we'd rented it out. Yes we had, a whole underground complex consisting of a large room, painted red where it wasn't covered with fake log paneling, red leather sofas, a big projector screen, a pool table, and a stage with a stripper's pole. The whole thing was like a cross between your parent's basement and a brothel.
Up another short flight of stairs was a tiny, icy swimming pool, some showers, and the sauna. Everything was made weirder by the fact that there were only 8 or 9 of us drifting around this big space that was clearly made to be packed full of raucous drunken Russians.
The boys went to play pool, and the girls went off somewhere, while Lindsay and I sat down on the sofa closest to the snacks and vodka. Stepan and Andrei, two slightly awkward young men, joined us, and we all had a kind of stumbling conversation. I tried to talk to Stepan in Russian, but he stopped me.
"You speak English? Easier this way. Is OK, I need practice to speak English."
But he ran out of English shortly afterwards, and the two of them got bored and wandered off
"Let's start on the vodka," Lindsay said. Well versed in the Russian style, she had already poured us out 2 cups apiece, one of vodka and the other of cranberry juice. Drinking straight vodka makes you an alcoholic in Russia, but drinking straight vodka followed by a slosh of juice, or maybe a pickle, makes you not only not an alcoholic, but a really fun and sociable individual.
Then we watched the guys play pool for a while, but soon people began started to go off and reappear in swimsuits. Josh and Glyn showed up in trunks, Masha in a pink robe, and Stepan in an unfortunate Speedo, and all of them urged us to join them in the sauna.
I had anticipated this peer pressure, and packed for it.
"Want a skirt?" I asked Lindsay, and so she put on one of my black miniskirts while I put on the other. I had also had the foresight to wear a black bikini top instead of a bra, so in the end I emerged as a modest but sufficiently unclad partaker of banya.
"Do you think we should take another shot?" Lindsay said. "I feel like we should."
We had another v/c for courage, and joined the others in the sauna.
Well, what can you say about saunas? They're hot. This one was so stoked up that my gold necklace heated up within a minute, and I had to claw it off lest it singe me. We stood it as long as we could, and then ran out to fling ourselves into the icewater pool. Then we drank some more. Then we went back in the sauna. Rinse. Repeat. I feel that this is the kind of sport that drives fat elderly businessmen into cardiac arrest.
-Vasily Ivanovich, where's Yuri Mikhailovich?
-I don't know, have you checked the bottom of the pool?
After many repetitions of this routine, I got too cold and shivery to swim, but too warm for the steam room, and fell back to merely dipping my toes in, and then to sitting on the bench outside the sauna and pressing my back to the nice toasty wall. Everyone was spinning around in the big space, losing coherence as a group, or just coherence period, so I was surprised to come across Josh huddled on the ledge at the opposite corner of the pool.
"What's up?" I said. It felt like the first thing I'd said in hours.
"Oh nothing," he said. "But I think we need to go soon. It's 5:30 and they're just up there watching us. They've been doing it for a while now."
Sure enough, the woman who had let us in and her male companion were standing behind a glass door at the head of yet another flight of stairs, staring down at us like the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw.
'Good Lord, that's creepy," I said. "Yeah, we should go."
I located my shirt and jeans, pulled them. Everyone else was milling around in various states of undress and confusion. Across the room, Andrei was carefully, lovingly, blow-drying Lindsay, all over, her hair and t-shirt, my skirt. She saw me raise an eyebrow and shrugged in that helpless, 'well-what-can-you-do?' way.
Masha collected some money to pay the rent, and then we all gathered our things, went out through the warehouse, and fell back into the fog and the rain. One by one people caught their buses and disappeared, until it was down to me and Glyn, who lived furthest away.
"Tell me another story about bears," he said in Russian, referring to a conversation we'd had a few weeks ago.
"I don't have any more bear stories," I said. "There's really not that much to say about bears. But once upon a time I was a caretaker for a quadriplegic woman who also hypoglycemic and always late, and she used to make me give her meals as we went down the highway at 70 mph…"
I was in that peculiar state of post-party clarity where you feel witty and tell (what seem at the time) very funny and engaging stories.
When I got back to my building, the babushka behind the door, the night shift babushka with the dyed orange hair and cat glasses, demanded to know where I'd been and what I'd been up to. I explained that I'd been at the banya with my friends, but she didn't understand my accent. She didn't understand, but she certainly disapproved.
I went off to bed and woke up 5 hours later in a dire state. But at least I knew about banyas now. Sometimes you have to make personal sacrifices in the name of research…

*A common belief. How do you say in Russian, 'I don't keep those bits in my feet?' Never mind, they get so upset that it's simpler and politer just to bow to custom and put some shoes on.