Sunday, Sept 8
Note: Travel Moscow is one of many posts available from Luxury Tours Worldwide, a global travel information provider.
Moscow Travel: I flew in to Moscow from New Mexico six days ago on Aeroflot (Russian Airlines), on a Ilyshin IL-96-300, with 235 seats an airplane of Russian manufacture. I sat next to a plasma physicist returning home from a visit to the University of California at Santa Barbara. He told me the plane has a perfect safety record. It was a very comfortable flight with excellent food.
Today is Sunday. It rained all last night, then ended this morning. The celebration of Moscow’s 849th Anniversary is continuing today, with an open air music programme in Red Square.
I didn’t get up till after midday. It was overcast and I failed to in fact realize how late it was. My friend Vardan woke me up after he and his mom got up. They also slept late. We ate breakfast, then went to the public bathhouse, which is located across the road from Vardan’s school.
It was a sauna with a cool water pool as well as showers. It cost us almost$12 for 2 hours. We received bottles of mineral water. According to the bottle the “Indications and Usage” (printed in English as well as Russian) of the water are “chronic gastritis, stomach and duodenum ulcer, chronic colitis. Chronic lever [sic], biliary and urinary ducts diseases, metabolism disturbances.” Without doubt these are some of the things that imbibing a lot of water might help!
Vardan additionally paid for 2 bundles of oak branches with green leaves, which were for beating the skin while in the sauna. The men’s and ladies areas were separate, since everybody is going in the sauna and pool nude.
When you first go in there is a good sized room for changing clothes that has 17 cubicles, each one about 5X6 feet in size using chairs constructed of brownish leather cushions and solid wood legs. There were also mirrors, hooks for clothes and a bottle opener hanging on the wall, and a area rug on the floor. Quite luxurious. Immediately outside the entry was a shop in which people could buy beverages, including beer, which could be consumed within the spa.
After removing clothing, people leave them hanging inside the cubicle and pick up a bath towel which is provided by the sauna. Then go directly into the shower room, which is a large space about fifty feet square with shower cubicles on one side and four rows of marble benches equally spaced up and down the room from end to end. Every seat is about 2×3 foot made of 2 in . thick marble supported upon cast iron legs. You get an empty plastic-type pan about twenty inches in diameter and 6 inches deep and you fill it with hot water from taps for that purpose which are found along the length of two sides of the room. Then you put your bunch of oak branches in the hot water. When you enter the sauna you take your oak branches along with you and use
it to beat your body, which is intended to stimulate the opening of the skin pores and be restorative.
The sauna itself is a room around 40 feet wide and one hundred feet long. There were a couple of levels, the lower level on which you enter, and the upper level, which is six steps up and about six feet above the lower. Nearly all people proceed to the upper level. Someone on the lower level opens a furnace door that is located about five feet above the ground and throws water inside, resulting in an abrupt increase in the humidity level of the sauna. Then he takes a round fan about two feet in diameter at the end of a three foot handle and fans it around making the hot moisture to permeate the atmosphere of the room. The effect is to make the body feel suddenly very hot so that the skin prickles. It also makes it difficult to breath. At this time everyone grabs their oak leaf branches and begins whipping themselves, that is each person beats his own body. This makes a lot of noise, kind of like a strong wind in a forest of trees. After a while of this everybody files out to get fresh air and go into the swimming pool. The swimming pool is cold and feels great after baking in the sauna. The sides of the pool room have mirrors on three sides and there is a 4 ft .walkway all around the pool. The pool itself is about thirty ft square. It is made specifically for cooling off, and is not really a swimming pool. The water is about 4 1/2 feet deep.
There are no signs notifying the public of the regulations and liabilities as you see in U.S. spas. Evidently Russia is not plagued by liability attorneys.
Off to the opposite side of the shower room from the shower stalls are massage stalls. Vardan bought us each a massage for $17 that lasted about 35 minutes. A male masseur worked over all the muscles of my feet, legs, arms, lower back, back, neck, head, chest and abdomen. It was the first such massage I had ever experienced. It brought to mind the muscle therapy massage I got once in L.A., which was temporarily painful in the muscles, but supposedly removes toxins from the muscles. It was sometimes painful, sometimes relaxing, and by the end it was exhausting.
After this we went home and had a meal of chicken with rice, served with tomatoes, cucumbers, hot peppers, pumpernickel bread, cheese, ham and mineral water.