My first weekend in Russia was fun.

Because many of our students are working adults, a lot of our work is conducted outside of office hours – i.e. evenings and Saturdays, although the school is thankfully closed on Sundays. This weekend was a public holiday, however: International Women’s Day, which, despite the moniker, is largely only celebrated in the ex-Soviet Union. Originally instituted by the UN in New York, it was envisaged as a holiday celebrating women in the workforce; the Soviets picked it up as part of its adoption of organised labour, and it gradually fell out of fashion in America and the West for much the same reason. Its celebration in Russia has mostly lost this context, and now serves as an all-purpose celebration of women, although this is largely theoretical in Russia’s hyper-masculinised society.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that we shut up shop early on Saturday and resolve to head for the local banya. A banya is the Russian equivalent of a sauna – a log cabin in the woods, about a mile outside of the city, on the edge of a (very frozen) lake. You get about five hours in the hut – the ten of us arrived at around 8 and left just after midnight – a functioning barbeque, to which we bought our own meat and expertise, and a handy hole in the ice of the lake, to which we will be returning. Oh yes.

We started out by cooking the food we’d bought – chicken, beef and pork chunks were skewered with vegetables, and Rob, Dan, Amanda and myself took it in turns to watch the meat and occasionally prod at it to see if it was done. In the meanwhile, those who weren’t involved in the cooking watched the greatest hits of the Eurovision Song Contest in the hut and drank very expensive vodka. We cannot be accused of not having conformed to local culture.

Food dispensed with, we explored our facilities. The banya had three rooms. The first was a normal room, in which we played cards, ate food, and messed around with the provided satanic backgammon board (don’t ask). The second is a kind of hot lobby; although there was no fire in there, the heat and steam from the banya itself kept it at sauna temperature. It was a good place to cool down after the banya itself and a good place to acclimatise when going in the other direction. Finally, the banya itself was a small-ish room with tiered levels of slat seating. One wall was taken up by a furnace which belched heat and humidity. The temperature in the room was, at a guess, around 45C, but the humidity was intense. I don’t cope well with saunas so it was an effort of will for me to stay in there, but I enjoyed it once I’d found my feet.

In addition to the above, we also had the services of a banshick, a man who comes into the sauna, pours various liquids onto you (beer, cold water, honey, you name it) then slaps you with a laurel branch while you lie face down on the slats. This is actually an extremely pleasant experience and a quite unique way to have a massage, although you’ll still find bits of laurel between your toes weeks later.

After around twenty minutes of this, you have generally had enough. The tradition is to then run down to the lake, which has had a 2m x 1m hole cut into it with an axe (the ice, for context, was about a foot thick), and plunge yourself in. The hole itself was a good hundred yards from the banya, a mad dash over slippery ice down an unlit path through the trees, at the end of which: some ice, and a hole. The water was sub-zero; if you left it alone for more than ten minutes or so it would start to re-freeze. After plunging yourself into the frozen water, you then scramble madly back up the hill, back into the hot then bolt for the safe heat and humidity of the banya, all the while shivering uncontrollably and scraping ice out of your hair. I took one look and thought: Nah. Fuck that.

Of course, that resolve didn’t last long.

And the bizarre thing is: it was brilliant. The heat from the banya stayed with me for the entire plunge, and by the time I got back into the sauna I was still wondering when the pain was going to start. Not only was there no real pain; the rush of endorphins was immense. I ended up going twice; Jon went three times and ended up staggering around with a spinning head. Totally worth doing, though, and great fun as a group outing.

Sunday was quiet – I took the opportunity to see a bit more of Tyumen, which was somewhat underwhelming. Monday started with brunch at Amanda’s, along with Rob, from the school, and two friends of Amanda’s from around town – which rapidly turned into lunch, then afternoon tea, before I made my excuses and ducked out at around 5. All in all a good weekend. In the next few days, I’ll teach my first class and get ready to relocate to Nizh, so I guess you have some or all of that to look forward to in the next gripping installment.