My Trip to Russia

When my sister lived in New York, we used to try to go to the 10^th Street baths whenever I came to visit her. Wednesdays were women’s days. You’d go in, give your 25 bucks to a man behind the counter who had a big belly and a hairy chest. He’d hand you a key for your locker and you’d walk past a sort of “deli” with a paltry offering of unidentifiable meats and canned juices, a TV hitched to a corner of the ceiling playing sports or Russian news and into the locker room. Inside your locker there was a an oversized robe that would only fit a man weighing at least 300 lbs and some flip flops and you’d exchange those for your clothes and head downstairs to the baths. As a teenager, this experience pretty much blew my mind. There were women of all shapes and sizes getting beaten with branches, walking around with mud on their faces and grinding kosher salt into every part of their bodies. But I was with my sister and it felt safe and cool and I always slept like a baby the night after he day I’d been there.

I figured, living in an urban area now, there must be something similar in my town. A quick google search a few years ago uncovered a little known Russian bath house not too far from my neighborhood. Women’s day at this bath house is on Mondays only from 4pm to 9pm. Every other hour of every other day is men only. It’s unfair but that is the subject of another blog entirely so I won’t go into my thoughts on that now. But, I do think when there are only 5 hours every week that something is available to you, it is so much more special when you actually take advantage of it. As luck would have it, I am in clinic on Mondays and there is nothing that calls for a few hours in a sauna like a day of vaginitis and complaints of sciatica.

Yesterday was an unusually slow day at clinic. I finished each chart before I saw the next patient. Everyone’s complaints were pretty straightforward and there were very few add-ons (which I was responsible for that day). The sheer boredom made me panicky though and I raced to the bath house as soon as I got into my car.

This Russian bath house is small. You come in, walk down a long hallway and into a locker room/check in area/tv room. Everything is open and public. And very very very laid back. There’s one bathroom for everyone, the woman taking money at the counter is always calling you honey and leaning on her elbows and talking to the women sitting in the TV room who are taking a break from their steams. There is a card table set up that always seems to have pastries or egg salad sandwiches set out for people to eat, though I’m still not sure who this food is for. More investigating will have to be done…

Anyway, the place is disgustingly cheap. For 26 dollars I got a towel, plastic sandals, unlimited time (well until 9pm that is) in the sauna and steam room, a platza treatment and a bottle of spring water. I stripped down, put all my clothes in the locker they assigned me, and turned off my brain. Well, tried too. The thing about this place is that it’s a community. These woman (anywhere from 20 to 70 years old) are regulars here. They know each other from the baths, from work, from growing up. And they have A LOT to talk about. The sauna is far from a meditative place to be when you just need some peace and quiet. It’s more of a really warm gossip session. This is a slice of real life. Everyone has thick accents and drooping bodies. And last night was not the first time I overheard some of the women talking about their recent plastic surgeries:

“I just got my eyes done.” One older woman said.

“You did? I can’t tell. Lemme see. What did you have done?”

“I know. It’s still a little swollen. I had all of this pulled back.” She points to the sides of her face by her eyes. “My doctor said it might take 4 months for the swelling to go down though.”

“Hm. Nice. I’m thinking about having something done too. But, were you black and blue?”

“Nope. For 2 weeks before the surgery I ate lots and lots of pineapple.”

“Really.”

“Tons. It make you less likely to bruise. But the doctor I go to, Richardson something or other, he does’em Thursday and Friday night so everyone goes back to work, no problem on Monday morning. I had mine done on Thursday late afternoon and let me tell you something, I was at Neiman Marcus on Friday morning. I got home Thursday night from the surgery and my friend had left me a message on my voice mail. All she said was: Neiman Marcus, 20% off sale. And I was there.”

“I’m just not sure. I mean, what if I don’t like what it looks like afterwards?”

“You know what you do? If you want to see what it’s gonna look like, you lie down on your back and look at your face in a mirror. When you lie back like that gravity pulls everything away. That’s exactly what you’ll look like.”

The woman who had just gotten the surgery was very obese. And, I just couldn’t help but think, Why did you choose your eyes?

Last night was my first time getting a platza treatment. Basically what that is, if you’ve never had one or seen it done, is me, lying naked on the top bench of wooden bleachers in the sauna while receiving an “invigorating” rub down with a branch from an oak tree (supposedly hand made by one of the men that works there every other day of the week) and periodically being doused with buckets of freezing cold water to “promote circulation” by a woman wearing a bikini. The platza was good, though, I couldn’t really see any evidence of things being cleaned at all between treatments. Not that I minded all that much. The whole place sort of makes it feel like you are in a garage or an unfinished, I mean really unfinished, basement. But the truth is, if the woman who got her rub down before me had crabs, I definitely have them now too. And let me tell you something else. When I got home and took a shower in my own bathroom, I found oak leaves in body parts I didn’t even know I had.

In addition, yesterday was the second straight week I witnessed a woman in the sauna openly shaving every part of her body. I mean, not just the places you usually shave either. She was going all out. Arms, feet, neck…and from what I could tell, she didn’t have any excess hair to begin with. She used a bucket of water sitting next to her to shake her razor out and then, when she was done, just dumped it on the floor, all the water and the little hairs trying to make their way to the drain. I looked away.

So, all in all, the baths are great. I’m sure some of my readers out there will disagree with me after my description but I’ve always been attracted to those places, physically and emotionally, that make people turn their heads and cringe. Why do you think I’m a midwife? Labor and birth is full of scary, dirty, smelly things. Panic, poop, blood and total exposure. I love being a part of experiences where there is absolutely no room for pretense. Things are real with a capital R and there is nowhere to hide from it. And I like that part of my job, a big part, is about normalizing those sometimes uncomfortable experiences for others. So, thankfully, the Russain baths did not include any blood or poop (that I saw anyway) but I think it’s another place where you can let it all hang out. You can sit there and sweat and talk shit and pull leaves out of your butt and no one will think twice.

Last night was the last session of the season. The baths reopen in September. And I have a feeling I’ll be going there a lot after work come fall.