Banya

The few days after New Year are always mad in Russia, apparently. As soon as the national holiday ends, universities kick off their second semester, which begins with a month-long batch of exams. It’s only logical, therefore, that Russian students spend their week (and a bit) of holiday trying to do as many things as possible EXCEPT for revision. So, after a day of cleaning up following our New Year’s Eve party, we decided to rent a banya for the evening. We emptied the contents of our fridge into the boot of Kirill’s car and set off. About halfway to the banya, Masha decided that we hadn’t brought enough food with us, so we stopped at a supermarket and bought so much stuff that there wasn’t enough space in the boot, and we had to pack it into the back of the car with us.

Kirill pulled up outside of a big spa complex. It looked rather fancy. It was in the centre of town, at the bottom of a towering glassy building. We loaded ourselves up with food and staggered towards the entrance to the spa complex. Kirill shook his head.

‘Not that spa, we’re in a different one. Go around the building!’

At the back of the building, we were confronted with the polar opposite to the glamorous spa at the front. There was a wooden shelter over an entrance to a basement, with the word ‘banya’ painted onto it. This didn’t bode well.

I needn’t have worried. The banya was falling apart slightly, but that didn’t matter much. I don’t know whose great idea it was to put a banya and a swimming pool in the basement of huge tower block (I’m no architect, but I’m pretty sure that’s a bad place to get damp), but it didn’t fall down on us, so I can’t complain. At the bottom of the stairs was a very smiley woman, who ushered us helpfully through the only door which you could go through from the ‘reception area’ (a wooden table with a cat on it). There was a big room with a pool table (semi-functional), a massage chair (for which you had to pay more), a corner that you could sit in (surprisingly there was nothing wrong with that bit of the room), a banya, and a very deep swimming pool. The entire place was ours, so we gleefully began dumping bag upon bag of food on the benches in the sitting corner. We really didn’t think the food situation through very well. Lots of the things we’d brought needed cutting. We’d overlooked the small matter of a knife though. We were left in the odd (but familiarly Russian) situation of trying to cut a block of kholodets (look it up, it’s like solid vomit on a plate, to put it mildly) with a plastic fork.

Abandoning the food, we all leapt into the banya. It was about 75 degrees Celsius, which apparently wasn’t hot enough. Max had brought some mint oil from home, and chucked it over the hot stones. You’re meant to use about half a teaspoon dissolved in a bucket of water, but he didn’t realise that until afterwards. He just chucked a small handful of the pure oil straight on. The fumes were so strong that we were all coughing and clawing at our eyes for the next twenty minutes. In an attempt to escape the ubiquitous mint fumes, we all ran out and cannonballed into the pool. The pool felt slightly weird being in a basement and lacking windows, but the important thing was that it could be used for some light bullying. Upon learning that his friend Polina (who’d come from Moscow to spend New Year with friends) couldn’t swim, Kirill grabbed her and fell into the pool, dragging her down kicking and screaming with ill-disguised glee. Then Masha discovered that you could pull the shower head right off the shower next to the pool, and use it as a high-pressure water pistol. We soon found ourselves playing a game of ‘don’t get burned’, as Masha turned the boiling jet on each of us and we ducked underwater and swam for our lives.

Next we tried out the pool table. Apparently pool is played differently in Russia: you don’t pot any particular balls, you just pot them in whatever order you want. It strikes me that this is much more boring than our version of pool, but it meant that I won a game for the first time in my life, so I can’t complain. Then we all fell on the food and demolished another busload of cake and kholodets.

As we were getting ready to leave, I reached into my bag for my towel. It scratched me.

‘Hmm, that’s odd’ I thought, ‘my towel’s never scratched me before.’ Opening my bag wide, I noticed that the furry thing inside my bag wasn’t my towel, but (and I probably should have guessed this), the black and white cat we’d seen sitting on the desk on our way in. It meowed at me and I closed the bag hurriedly.

‘Ok nobody panic, but there’s a cat in my bag and it doesn’t want to get out.’ 

Nobody panicked. 

Sokol (Kirill’s friend from school) strode up, unzipped my bag, and thrust his hand in. He pulled it out again pretty quickly a few moments later.

‘Ouch! It scratched me!’

Masha seemed not to believe the cat story, so she wondered over and glanced in the bag.

‘Oh yeah!’ She said. ‘There is a cat in there. That’s funny!’ Then she walked a safe distance away and watched to see what I’d do next.

The cat did not want food or hugs. It wanted to live in my bag and for us to leave it alone.  This arrangement didn’t suit me so well. I tried putting the bag on the floor and nudging it gently with my foot. That didn’t suit the cat so well. I tried opening the zip as wide as it could go to remind the cat that there was a world outside the bag. But the cat responded by trying to close the zip again with limited success.

In the end, we all got bored of playing coax the cat, and went about putting on our shoes and coats and collecting the remnants of the food. The cat, bemused, slunk out of the bag with a sly look that seemed to say ‘why didn’t you just ask nicely?’

The next stop was the ice slopes. In Russian, they’re called ‘little mountains’, which is cute, but doesn’t do justice to how absurdly dangerous they are. As soon as it got cold enough that ice wouldn’t melt, ice sculptures popped up all around Krasnoyarsk. And among any set of ice sculptures there is bound to be at least one ice slope. It’s basically a children’s slide carved out of a huge block of ice. Some of them are no bigger than a playground slide, and some of them are around the size of a semi-detached house. They all have scarily low edges made of ice, so that you’ll ping around between two ice walls like a bowling ball on an alley with barriers on the way down (presuming you aren’t going so fast that you just go right over the edge and fall ten feet). When you go to slide down the ice slopes, you bring nifty little sheets of plastic with a handle with you (everyone seems to have them in their houses), and put this sheet under your bum so that there’s eeeeven less friction than there would be if you were just, you know, sliding down a slope made of ice on your bum.

I’m aware that I’m sounding a little bit granddad-y, but before you judge, let’s just watch these videos:

I have to say, it was great fun. But it shows a fundamental difference in the way you construct things in public spaces in Britain and Russia. In Britain, most people would be terrified to build any kind of fun outdoor attraction for fear of being sued for negligence of health and safety considerations. Even if they were brazen enough to build a play area for people in public to just have fun on at their peril, they’d probably realise that someone had to pay for it and then reconsider. I’m honestly not sure who pays for the ice slopes, maybe it’s the council (if so, they have their priorities very wrong), but I like their guts. For them, it’s less a question of ‘we built it, so we’re responsible’, and more a sort of ‘heck we put it up, people can bloody well use it how they want. If they get hurt that’s their bad.’ I discovered this on my very first ride, when a couple of kids in front of me hurtled down head-first on tiny sheets of cardboard that they’d presumably found in some nearby bin. This emboldened me, so I agreed to share a plastic sledge with Masha, even though they’re only really designed for one person. Max gave us a helpful kick on the way down, and we started pinging about between the ice walls as we gathered speed. I imagine we looked a bit like a ball in a pinball machine. When I was feeling the burn of lifting my legs above the level of the ice walls, I lowered them a bit, and they got caught between one such wall and the rest of me, which was very painful, and a really good incentive to keep lifting my legs up. As we were reaching full speed and the slide was levelling out, I noticed a blur of red on the ice below us: a pretty sizeable bloodstain. I’m pretty confident it wasn’t my blood. At the end of the slide, someone had cleverly built a pile of snow to slow us down. Except that lots of people had used the slide before us, and the pile of snow had been compacted into a pile of ice. To put it another way, the brake mechanism at the bottom of this enormous ice slope was an ice cube the size of a hummer. Hardly had I seen it rushing towards me, when our sheet of plastic did one more leisurely 180 degree turn, and I found myself between a very big block of ice and Masha. That also hurt. I kept on feeling that one for about two weeks.