Last night, my friend S and I went to Banya A Russian Bath House near the massage school I used to work at.We enter the front door, and to the right is two feathery looking soft leather chairs - done in subtle earth tones to create a feeling of serenity and peace. To the right, a fridge full of yummy drinky healthy goodness such as, "Kombucha Joy", "Odwalla - Find Your Inner Yin", and my favorite, "Your Minty Muscles". Actually that last one was a goo, but I digress.
We walk up to the front desk, and a lovely delicate gay boy gives us paperwork to fill out. We sign our forms, yadda, yadda...go back up to the desk, get our locker keys, sandals, and robes. In the women's locker room there are stacks of neatly folded plush towels, fake pussy willows coming out of a vase sporting the aforementioned "soothing earth tones", bottles of womanly fresh goo, and a smattering of lockers. I must admit, it's smaller than I thought it would be. S and I lose our clothing, take the obligatory "clean your dirty selves before entering the oasis" shower, don our robes, and enter the main room.
The main room consists of a brilliantly blue-lit hot tub, a bathwater tepid pool, a steam room complete with fresh eucalyptus plants (yummy!), shit-ass hot sauna, and a cold plunge. S and I start out in the steam room...and from there do various combinations of the tepid pool, cold plunge and sauna. I wasn't a big fan of the sauna (which was at, I think, 220 degrees). It was too hot, I'm still fresh enough out of surgery that my body was just overwhelmed, plus the floor was scalding hot. S liked it though because she had to go into the sauna to get her body hot enough to do the cold plunge.
Pause for geeky massage moment: Revulsive hydrotherapy is the shit.
During the next hour, discussions of boys and the massage school take place, there is much giggling and laughing about the 50-something "ladies who lunch" sitting in the pool next to us, and many more water sports ensue.
We finally start to start to leave. We decide to do the cold plunge one more time. S has to go into the sauna to get hot enough to do it, and in her excitement to get there, notices a basin of "herb water" with a large frond of large leafy herbs bundled into a fan floating on the surface of the water. So S gets all excited, beckons me to bring the herb water dripping frond into the sauna. She then procedes to show me what is "suppose" to be done with frond. Apparently one is suppose to beat oneself about the body with the frond, thus baptizing oneself in the herby goodness. So as I prance wildly up and down due to the smoldering heat that has started to occur in my feet, S is giggling wildy and beating my naked body with this herb frond. She then jumps up and down like a little 12-year old about to have a tea party and with a big shit-eating grin on her face, hands me the frond and says, "Do me too please...". I beat her a few times, and then as I'm starting to smell smoke I say, "DOOD, burning!" and point to my feet. It would have made a really good comedy porn.
The cold plunge was a like a warm downy comforter compared to the hades I'd just come from. So then S gets hot enough, does the cold plunge, we take a shower, encounter a really obnoxious east-side "type" in the dressing room, pay our bill, and then leave.
We then went to have a drinky, some Thai food, and a really damn fine conversation for the rest of the evening.
I have welts this morning...
Just Kidding...
those were from Ly, not S.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Picture this...
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8 comments:
Boy the term "bath house" congers up a totally different experience to me:) There was a gay bath house in Chicago across from the club we used to go to when I was 19. I only went there once with a friend to buy some "rush". I was definitely the only woman around and I could tell that made some people uncomfortable:)
It sounds like you, however, had a wonderful evening.
Shit Lonna, we're the same age, which means that we both would have been 19 at the same time. And *I* was in Chicago going to school when I was 19. I attended Roosevelt University for 2 years. What club? Where was it?
It was on North Clark, across from the Bistro II. I don't remember the name of it, but we liked it better than the Bistro. I remember that is was one of the few clubs we went to that wasn't on Halsted. For some reason I'm thinking that it started with an R, like the rave or something lame like that.
Yeah, I thought about it after I posted and was like Stine, there's no way you'd remember what the place was called. It was two years of much imbibing.
I remember a lot of the places we used to go to. We used to go to Medusa's when we weren't in the mood to fight over IDs. Then there was the Lucky Horseshoe (and free drinks from Flipper the bartender) with male strippers, the Vortex, Roscoes, Maneuvers in Joliet. We used to go other places that came and went very quickly, but they were all on Halsted near Roscoe and Clark. GT.
Absolutely green with envy over this, and chuckling out loud over the "do me" sections.
Good lord. You've got some guts. I think having to walk around naked, endure severe hot and colds, and then being hit with something to SUCK. Mark and I talked about going to a hammam when we were on our honeymoon in Morocco, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.
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