Spa 88 Is Dirty Banya

My audience today

I'm suddenly big in Minsk

An hour after arriving, the earnest young Moroccan and his haughty Chinese friend were discussing acting classes in the bigger sauna.  The Uzbeki children had disappeared, and the mildly Caucasian-looking men were sitting exactly as they had been an hour beforehand.

I went upstairs to the pool area for a swim.  By this point, the Moroccan and his cohorts were in the sauna, and a bearded tattooed wiry man and his partially-Asian girlfriend were in the center of the pool.  So I jumped in the deep end.  After a few breast strokes, I stood at the end then floated.  The water felt greasy, and there was a clearly visible pile of dirt in the bottom corner of the deep end.  I recalled how beautifully pristine and secluded the New Jersey banya pool had been.  I showered and returned downstairs.

Shortly thereafter, I felt a pat on my back, and looking up from an Economist editorial about the need for better dialogue between the Israelis and Palestinians, I saw Luis, Jamie, Jo, and Ian.  Luis, Jamie, Ian and I know each other from grad school.  Jo, the Japanese, works with Jamie in Newcastle, England.  Did you know that Menkui Te means “I want to eat” in Japanese?

I had met up with Luis for a night on the town last night.  He and Paula, a friend of his from Mexico visiting from Boston had been enjoying a sip of Prosecco at the time I finished teaching.  Instinct had led me to text message him to see if he wanted to meet up, and fortuitously enough, they happened to be only a few blocks away enjoying outdoor seats in the warmth of the sun.  As if by homing instinct, Elliot arrived shortly thereafter like a pigeon carrying an important message that as far as I remember was never delivered.

And we four, and a dynamic cast of itinerant characters, spent the next several hours socializing with our drinks at The Magician until near midnight, at which point I gazed across the room to see Elliot with a milky smile giving a silent wave to me as the three of them slid out magically and disappeared into the night.  I wandered through the packed streets of the lower east side for a little while before realizing that I was tired and hungry, and had eaten nothing at all since the plump dumplings for lunch.

Vegetable Dumplings

As I made my way to the subway on Houston St & Broadway, I stopped off at Yonah Schimmel’s Knishery, next door to the Landmark Sunshine theater.  Oddly enough, I had run into John Schimmel, of no relation that I know of to the Romanian knish magnate, at Astor Place between the time when I finished teaching, and the time only a few minutes later when I met up with Luis.  He’s another grad of the same NYU program.  John Schimmel and I had briefly discussed his plans to hook his toilet to the internet and give it its own Twitter feed.  His McLuhanesque girlfriend was adamant that literally broadcasting crap was the best use of the Twitter medium.  I had suggested the toilet should use Twitter to advertise its availability when John was not around.  It was thus preordained that I would eat a spinach knish with mustard at Yonah Schimmel’s.

The proprietor at Yonah Schimmels asked if I wanted the knish heated up. I said yes.  Whether I asked, I can’t remember.  But he nevertheless informed me that they were not always open at this time of night.  I remarked that it was probably good for business regardless, motioning out the window to the crowds of revelers streaming past.  Yet, as if in a dream, the knish shop was empty except for he, me, and a girl sitting at the nearest table, listening to our conversation, who I assumed was his personal plump dumpling.  He responded that yes, there were flocks of drunk people all around.  I felt compelled to disclose that I was myself quite drunk, but he was not deterred.  “Yes, but nothing  like them”, he said, gesturing out the window.

About a half hour earlier, very soon after I had embarked upon my dérive through the Lower East Side, I had seen two people carrying a passed-out girl, presumably a friend of theirs, across Houston.  And again, a few minutes before entering the knish shop, I had seen the same limp girl being lifted by emergency medical technicians into an ambulance.  The friends were not in sight.  What had she been doing in the intervening 25 minutes?  Yonah Schimmel’s knish man said, “There are more people drunk now than before, right?”  He was talking about the effects of the economic downturn.

Since the knish man and I were basically family at this point, there was no need for a goodbye.  I continued along Houston towards the subway, nibbling my knish, dipping it in the small cup of delicious mustard, and enjoying the spectactle of people who are not so different from me streaming past in all our unimaginative glory.

The train ride home was mostly uneventful.  A relatively large black girl sat across from me, and although we were in Manhattan, I was confident she was on her way to Church Avenue.  She barely moved, yet I sensed a certain tension and discomfort emanating from her… possibly from her very thick thighs. So I stared at them trying to ascertain the source.  Somewhere near Atlantic Avenue, the train stopped inexplicably between stations.  The girl let out an impotent bleat of outrage, but her thighs didn’t move.

Soon after this event, I discovered a worn middle-aged Caucasian-looking man in worn denim, the type you would see playing blackgammon in Tblisi, playing a highly graphical car racing game on his phone while his plump young blonde dumpling watched on chuckling and resting her head on his shoulder.  They were an unlikely but jolly couple, and it lifted my spirits to be next to happy people.

Town Square in Sighnaghi, Georgia

The cold plunge in the Spa 88 banya was not extremely cold, although what it lacked in chill, it made up for in depth.  One can jump into it and make a comfortable splash.  Despite showering after every cold plunge, I occasionally found other people’s hairs on my hands.  And each time I’ve been in this banya, the area around the cold plunge has been covered in a few inches of water that is either runoff from the showers, or overflow from the cold plunge itself.  Either way, it is simply unhygienic and a sign of poor maintenance.  Although I couldn’t resist the cold plunge, towards the end, I used an unimpressive cold water shower instead.

The main sauna room is quite filthy, with dark stains and dislodged pieces of wood in the benches.  The is a gentle patina of other people’s sweat that insinuates itself into the odor of the room, which perhaps surprisingly is something that is usually absent in better-kept banyas.  The room is painted an awful indiscernible color that enhances the uneven, bumpy, cancerous texture of the ceiling.  Occasionally a fit shirtless Russian lad came in and incompetently swept the venik off of the floor with a broom that was as sturdy as the spinach in my dumpling broth a day earlier.  There were still scraps of  venik left on the floor throughout the night despite my having seen only one person using it.

The shvitz room was well heated, and less popular, and hence a bit cleaner.  My main complaint in Sandoony is the mild temperature in the shvitz.  If the Spa 88 banya has anything to say for itself, it is the temperature in the shvitz.

The Turkish room had a constant flow of steam loudly pumped.  Despite the thick fog permeating the room, the tiled walls and benches were visibly dirty, and I felt uncomfortable enough about staying in a dirty room with warm disease-carrying vectors of steam that I summarily left after a minute, never to return.

At Luis’s recommendation, he ad I decided not to eat at Spa 88 for fear of disappointment.  Jamie and Jo left for Williamsburg, where they are staying.  And Ian set off for parts unknown.  Luis and I settled upon a borsch, pierogies, and latkes at Vesulka, further uptown.  The borsch was small, but good for something in that part of town.  The pierogies were done adequately, and the latkes were of the mashed variety.  Quite nice, but not my mama’s grated latkes.  It’s only now that I remember my favorite dish at Vesulka, from years past, is the lentil salad.