BANYA!!!

OK BE SURE TO READ THIS BECAUSE THIS IS AWESOME. Resulting from the fact that I did little research before coming here I had never even heard of this. When hanging out at the mountain resort place my buddys wer talking about it and pretty much explained it to me as follows: “mad naked Russian dudes hitting each other with branches in a sauna.” Luckily for me my second day here was banya day. First let me say that banya situations vary. For some people in houses that build private banyas in their backyard. Others in apartments have tubs and some kind of shower of bucket washing system. And still others, like me, get to experience the public banya. So I went to the banya. You strip down in a locker room then walk into the hottest sauna I have ever been in in my life. I lasted maybe 30 seconds and then moved on (thus no time for the branches which I still haven’t really figured out). The next room is a big tiled room with buckets where you wash yourself by splashing yourself with water. The first time I went was pretty much like the first time you have to change in a locker room for gym as a 6th grader in middle school. But, after being invited home with an old man to talk about, I think, America and his family, I was pretty much a regular by my second trip. Make no mistake, Banya-ing is amazingly refreshing and you get very clean. In my attempt to integrate into the culture however I subscribed to the once a week banya schedule. At the end of the first week however it was made clear to me that you are supposed to somewhat bathe yourself in between banyas. This realization came when some of the other PCV’s demanded that I wash my hair in the bathroom sink at one of our training sites. I thought it would be a funny story to tell my mama when I got home, but somehow between language barriers and her son being the dirty boy in class I think she was horribly disappointed in me.