sagesex

The people I meet often tell me they envy me for the life I’m leading: Traveling and writing about it, exciting adventures all the time … but as a travel companion of mine once said: They don’t know how it is.

In fact, it can be exhausting, frustrating, boring, lonely, … you name it.

This is how Russian suburbs and the traveller's life sometimes look. Well, the former more often.

Sometimes you just wish you could be at home, watching TV with a beautiful girl in your arm.This is how I felt yesterday, arriving in Moscow on a very early flight after a sleepless night in Novosibirsk: I had left Akademgorod (more on that another time) in the afternoon, planning what everybody thought was crazy for one reason (safety) or another (boredom): Spend the night roaming the streets of Novosibirsk. Turns out they were right. Not about the safety, it’s perfectly fine. But about the boredom. In the evening, everything still looked promising: Niko, a cool math guy (yeah, there are such people!) from the conference, roamed the streets with me, and we enjoyed the post-socialist scenery and populist celebration of Russia’s flag day. Here are some photos:

But after Niko had left, the evening quickly turned stale. I tried all the bars and clubs along красный проспект (krasny prospekt – beautiful prospekt) and somehow I could not connect with the rich (or posing as rich) young people in unbelievably big cars, dancing in bars like Guevara, where a Guinness cost me 260 rubles, which is about 6 Euro or 8.5 Dollars, and a very patriotic band played Russian hits and Western trash covers, or clubs like Rock City, where the latest Marlboro spin-off (gold rim or some such thing) was celebrated to unbelievably bad dance music – another common property of all these establishments. They even had a “Café del Mar” – surely the furthest away one from the sea there is in the world – with nobody in there. To cut a long story short, after a while I preferred talking (or rather gesticulating – I couldn’t really speak Russian, and he couldn’t really speak at all) to a weird bum in front of the ultramodern railway station (Inside, everything is in Moscow time, three hours back!) over clubbing, until finally the first bus at five took me to the airport.

After awful airport waiting and too short a flight to get enough sleep, here I was in grey, cloudy Moscow at 9 in the morning: tired, lonely, exhausted, and bent on not letting this exiting opportunity pass me by. I had to experience some adventures, hadn’t I? But I could barely keep my eyes open. I felt that I’d better abandon the blitzkrieg of experience I was on. Indeed, it dawned upon me that when you live on the road, you can’t always be full-on. You have to LIVE as well. Now I don’t yet live on the road, but the last weeks have given me a taste of how it might feel like, and I might soon get the chance, supposed you keep on giving me credible stats for sagesex so that the German authorities believe this is an enterprise worth sponsoring. But what was I to do now? Well, what do you do when you are a tired tourist in a new city? You behave like a tourist – and so I did, sightseeing the musts that lay in walking distance of my hostel:

Anyway, after all this sightseeing I still felt like shit, but I really wanted to go on an adventure, too. So here’s what I came up with: a wellness adventure! At my wonderful hostel they have lots of travel guides lying around, one of them being the seemingly really informative Rough Guide to Moscow, which told me about баня (banja), the russian form of steam baths, that is said to cure “feeling heavy”, the Russian expression for anything between fatigue and depression. They explained the procedure, and they warned that these are often visited by the Russian mob, which leads to brawls on thursdays (why thursdays?) and murders the day after! Furthermore, they listed some of them, and while usually the prices started way above 1000 rubles (more than €20), there was one, that they said is pre-revolutionary and scruffy but visited by the less affluent because of the quality of its steam and the moderate price of 150 rubles (about €3.50). I found they were wrong on some accounts …

I took the metro to Проспект Мира (Prospekt Mira – Peace Prospekt) to find the place, and went looking for at least half an hour. The place is really hidden, and I was just about to give up, when I saw this promising building (It’s supposed to be at Astrakhanskiy per. 5/9, in case you want to go):

The бани before I went in

Well yes, this place looked beat-up! This must be it. Timidly I walked in, just to decipher a sign that said 750 rubles (€17) entry fee! I couldn’t believe my eyes but the typical elderly cashier insisted. Either the Rough Guide sucked or they had increased their price to 500% in 5 months! The Rough Guide claims to date from March 2009! Still, to be fair, I found it the most appealing of the circa 10 guides lying about in the hostel. Did I really want to do this? Fuck it, I thought. I had looked for so long, I really needed to relax (I’m a pisces, and these water thingies always do it for me), and it looked like an adventure, what with the shabby building and nobody speaking any English. So yes, let’s bathe instead of eating!

I showed my ticket to the controller (in Russian public institutions you always have tons of people for the tiniest jobs), and got led into a room with lots of naked men and assigned a place in what looked like an Orient Express séparé: Wooden entrance shaped like an Omega, a table in the middle and fake leather sofas in overall baroque décor. Since there had already been a few departures from the protocol described in the guide, I was unsure what to do. But a man who looked like a doctor in a lab coat finally took pity with me and I managed to give my valuables in his care, drop my clothes, and at some point even obtain a веник (venik – a bundle of twigs, mine was oak, but I saw birch as well) for another 170 rubles.

Inside, the place really didn’t look scruffy at all. More old school luxurious, with ornamented tiles and wood/fake leather interior. But who were these men? How could they afford €20 for two hours of steam bathing, I began to wonder, especially after I saw that in my cabin, someone had left over the major part of a huge plate of the most deliciously looking crustaceans I had ever seen. Lots of food and drink lay around in this place, and I could not find out how people obtained it. Of course I stole one of the crabs.

There were three more rooms, which were held in more practical tiling: A huge place with showers, where people soaked their veniks in water in between uses, a room with a cold plunge pool, and the hot room proper. At first, it seemed that nothing was on, everybody was just chilling, and the hot room stood open. All in all, it seemed most of these guys knew each other pretty well, they took care of not only a lot of socializing but all personal hygiene in there, they drank and ate and were merry. Most were pretty young, between 20 and 50, I’d say. One of the older ones had others shave his head, his behavior implying some kind of authority or hierarchy – I wonder who this might be. It all looked kind of funny because some of them were wearing crazy felt hats like this one, but most of them also featured very short hair and were rather strongly built. On the other hand, only few of them had tattoos, so if Russian mobsters in movies are any realistic, these fellows were probably harmless. Still, I enjoyed to be the silent observer of these inner circles, yet being glad that I didn’t understand what they said, thus reducing my own chances of winding up dead the next day. I’m alive now, two days after, let’s cross our fingers that I survive two more days in Russia after publishing this.

My ethnographic field studies were interrupted when the ritual finally began. And what a great, raw, visceral ritual it was! First, only a few select people enter the steam room, which is rather bare, except for a large wooden platform, the huge oven – which looks a bit like a mixture between pizzeria and crematory -, and two doors – one for people, one for steam. Everybody watches as the master of ceremony holds up the five fingers of his hand before throwing big tubs of water (well, only the water) into the oven. He then closes the oven door, and the rest of the crowd enters, completely filling the platform with bodies, stretched out face-down, the really hardy lying on benches a bit higher than the platform. In the second round I managed to get a place on the platform as well. Then the master of ceremony binds a large sheet to a stick so that it looks like a flag, holds up his five fingers again, and begins to stir the hot, humid air over the sufferers. And you do suffer! It is quite a strange sight, a room full of men lying prone on the floor trying to protect their heads from the scorching, breathtaking heat; it is quite another experience lying there yourself, trying to survive. After the master is through with the big flag, usually another guy comes to finish the crowd with a venik or a smaller flag-like object that he can wave directly over the burning bodies. After we survived this, everybody clapped and ran out, a few directly to the cold plunge pool, but the tough guys – including yours truly, who likes to cite the Marine’s motto “pain is weakness leaving the body” – returned with their veniks to flail themselves and others in the remaining heat. This I found truly a great experience, the smell of the fresh leaves, the feeling of the twig strokes on the skin, the heat and exhaustion … until finally, just before blacking out, I too jumped into the cold and waited for another round.

When I returned to my cabin, the owner of the crabs was there, working on the huge plate. Somehow, he did not fit my idea of a godfather: Though he wore a gold chain (almost everybody did), he looked more like a banker, talked to his wife on the phone, and did not have the social mores of offering some of his abundant meal to me, sitting naked and hungry opposite to him. I thought a more alpha guy would have taken the chance to feed a potential new hit man like me. Maybe these were just square bankers after all. I hope we will never find out.

When I left the banja, I felt truly purified. This had been well worth spending 20 €. I took another photo of this miraculous and enigmatic place:

The bani after the deed

Look closely! The change wasn’t all internal – the dullness of a grey and cloudy day had wondrously given way to a golden sunny evening. I felt so great that I risked fainting in the street from physical weakness for wandering through the golden wonderland that Moscow’s huge urban landscape now presented. I could write another post on the beauty I experienced this evening, but I’ll just leave you with this photo that I feel hints at my delight:

One of many miracles of a golden Moscow evening

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How I cured the travel blues after a long night out in Novosibirsk in a Moscow steam bath with what might have been the Russian mafia.