On alcohol
“Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.”
― Frank Sinatra
Alcohol is always a good place to start. I mean everyone needs a good drink don’t they? Or do they? Now of course the wonderful thing about alcohol is that it is usually involved in some form or another in those fascinating scenarios in your life’s past that are the most amusing. Not sure whether this is indeed the alcohol ‘talking’ or it reduces your barriers and protestations to try something new. When you are walking through that Tesco 24hr supermarket at 3am in the morning with a sudden desire to purchase washing up powder…yes you may look like a tit. But it leads to the amusement of that moment surrounded by fellow students.
Russian banya’s and the lesson of alcohol
So I love Russia and its people. It is a bleak and hard country where the inhabitants are generally suspicious of all outsiders but if you are welcomed into the proverbial bosom of their outstretched arms you are in for one hell of a ride. And that ride seems to be fuelled by alcohol.
One company I worked for owned a small sugar factory about 7 hours South of Moscow and a little over an hour’s drive from Voronezh. As any self-respecting sugar factory does it has its own banya. A banya is a way of life and across Russia every house seems to have the bath / sauna house adjacent to it, with hot coals and access to water and in all respects like a Swedish sauna. But I suspect was actually just the bathroom of the house. So the factory has its own banya and as I was invited to the Board of Director’s Meeting at the factory as the London representative, I was asked whether the following night I would like to take a visit to the factory’s inbuilt banya? The Finance manager of the factory was a very jovial German fellow and I would also be accompanied by the factory director and lets call him Mark (a fellow Londoner working in Poland).
You entered the Banya room where there was a table laden with sausage and cabbage and numerous bottles of vodka, an ice cold plunge bath in the corner of the room and the heated wooden clad banya in the corner. Outside we passed from about -5 degrees snowy conditions into an anti-chamber where we removed our clothes and put on white gowns with slippers. Then we passed into the inner room where we could eat and drink, whilst perched in our gowns.
At this point I was slightly bemused with the thought of 4 grown men sitting around in gowns eating sausage (on the table of course) and doing the never ending Russian toasts. It was at this point that I realised that vodka does help ones sense of being. I also realised that toasts in Russia involve everyone doing a toast and are really a means to an end as a delivery system to get the vodka into your body. The German being ever the banya enthusiast kept looking longingly at the wooden door with steamed window and with a final nod from factory director (as host) we traipsed across and into the room. The heat hits you like a furnace, forcing the liquid out of your body through its pores. After about 5 minutes which is about all we could bear, one went outside, removed the gown, plunged into the cool tub (which hit you equally like an express train driving the breath from out of you) and then you woozily returned to the table for more vodka. The vodka and food kept flowing and each trip to the banya and plunge pool become that much more bearable. Now it was on about the 4th visit to the banya that Lars feels comfortable enough to announce his piece de resistance and asks whether we like birch. Neither Mark nor I knew what he was blathering on about whilst the factory director sat with a slight smile in the corner of the room, obviously having enjoyed this scene many times.
The German then invited us to remove our gowns and huddle over in the front row of seats of the banya and then proceeded to flail Mark and I using a birch branch that he kept dipping into a barrel of hot water. Now I can’t even remember whether this was painful and there may even have been oil involved as well. But at this point Mark and I looked at each other and then started giggling. This was, despite the vodka, too much! Here we were, 2 fully grown, rather pale, naked men being flailed by a mad German with a maniacal smile and our pimp host grinning in the corner. Enough said…had I been a teetotaller I would probably have not even been in that Banya that night and certainly would not have still been there for the ceremonial beating. But the memory is one of those strange and delightful experiences to be trotted out for perpetuity at cocktail parties. Except perhaps to ones parents’ in law.