From “Dacha” to Dacha, or: Fun With Seamen

Last Saturday—that would be the weekend before Halloween—Steph and I finally made it to “Dacha,” the St. Petersburg club that someone must have built as an answer to the seemingly rhetorical question, “What could possibly be more crowded than a weekday morning metro car?” Regardless, the drinks were cheap and the music was awesome—even American clubs don’t play American ‘90s rock anymore—so we stayed, and on our second or so trip to the bar we encountered a pair of Russian seamen. Uh, make that Russian sailors. Anyway, here's the miraculous thing: they weren't at all sketchy. They were drinking, but not a whole lot, and they didn't try anything, and they made intelligent conversation. The four of us hung out and talked (in Russian! So much language practice!) finally ending up at a Subway, of all places, before dispersing for what was left of that night.

The next day we ended up hanging out with them again, along with their friends Petya and Alya. We were supposed to see a movie, but the movie was cancelled. Or we got the show time wrong. Or something. Anyway, what we did do was a marathon “progulka”—gets lost in translation, the closest approximation is “aimless stroll”—that took us practically all over the city. Somewhere in the course of this, we got invited out to this one guy’s dacha, where they were planning to go the following weekend. A dacha, for those of you who are uninformed, is a country cottage, and this particular guy’s dacha was fairly large and had a banya. More on that later.

We already had train tickets to go to Petrozavodsk that weekend, but Stephanie, Kathleen and I decided to exchange our return tickets for earlier ones. So it happened that we took an overnight train to Petrozavodsk on Thursday night, spent the day there Friday, took another overnight train back Friday night, slept, took the train out to the dacha Saturday afternoon, stayed at the dacha till Sunday afternoon, then took the train back to Petersburg, arriving Sunday evening. Phew.

Despite the weekend’s pace, it ended up going well. Petrozavodsk was fun—I couldn’t reach the people I’d lived with five years ago, but it was a blast seeing familiar places, souvenir shopping and going to random museums. At night we decided to try a banya in preparation for Saturday, which was quite an experience. First of all, it took us literally an hour to find the banya, despite the tininess of the town: we traversed literally the entire length of the street the banya was on, overshooting it numerous times. And then there was the banya itself…

A banya consists of one room with showers, benches and wash basins, and another that is basically a really humid sauna. You go back and forth between these two rooms—completely naked, of course—washing yourself in the wash room and “steaming” in the steam room. “Steaming” involves “veniki,” birch branches that, if applied in the proper manner, help circulation or something. The proper manner? Beating. (What did you expect? This is Russia!) So I guess Kathleen and Steph and I looked like pretty obvious foreigners, because one of the banya employees, a capable-looking middle-aged woman, decided to show us what the banya was all about. I was sitting timidly in the steam room when she grabbed a venik and told me to bend over. There are very few situations in which being naked and beaten with a stick by a woman you don’t know is a perfectly natural and wholesome thing. The banya is one of them. She repeated this procedure on my friends, then, once we were out of the steam room, scrubbed us each in turn with a two-handled washcloth. And yes, this was also very wholesome. It might have seemed sketchier if the banya hadn’t been filled with women all doing the same thing to each other, but as it was, it seemed like a wonderful idea. I left there feeling cleaner than I had in months. Of course, the overnight train ride back pretty much destroyed that, but then, there was another banya to look forward to on Saturday.

The train rides were perhaps the low point of the weekend. We rode plotzkart, the cheapest but least comfortable option. Thursday night we slept—or tried to, anyway—across the aisle from a guy who snored so loudly it was a wonder he slept through his own nasal eruptions. Friday night, we were next to a group of Russian preteens. Preteens are the most unpleasant Russian people to deal with in general, but especially so when you haven’t slept for over 30 hours and they’re running on hormones and a Fanta high. Fortunately, I had berushki (earplugs) on me, and while getting to sleep with foam things in your ear canals is unpleasant, it beats listening to 12-year-olds screaming “Smack my bitch up!” with hideous accents.

So it was that, the following day, we set off to spend a night in the middle of nowhere with people we’d only known for a week—LET ME EXPLAIN, LET ME EXPLAIN!!! I suppose there’s no way to make the situation sound safe, but it was. The company consisted of the three American girls, the guy whose parents owned the dacha, our friends Vanya and Oleg, their friend Petya, and Petya’s wife and two sisters. The dacha was extremely well heated, and us Americans were given our own room to sleep in. As for the dacha’s private banya—well, the girls wore towels, although some of the guys weren’t so modest. So basically, I'm sure there are things to be said for following parents' advice and being cautious all the time, but sometimes a situation that has massive potential to end in unspeakable sketchiness can instead become a fun and memorable night of banya-ing, grilled-meat-eating, vodka toasting, and talking around the campfire. It was the most quintessentially Russian experience I've had in Russia thus far. And I'm sure it was worth at least five conversation classes. Or so I plan on telling my teachers when they ask where my homework from this past weekend is.