Monsha etiquette

Every week I get to bathe, well its not really bathing it’s called a monsha, in Russian it’s called a banya. And yes I’ve begun to consider bathing not as a right but more of a privilege, this is coming from the guy who used to shower twice a day. Anyway the local monsha is in the village center so usually on Monday’s I go there. It’s only open Saturday-Monday, I like going on Monday because it is never very crowded then. I can also avoid creepy questions about my nationality and about the crazy amount of hair on my body when compared to Kazakh men. Anyway the monsha is separated first by sexes and then into three parts: the locker room, the bathing area, and the steam room.

So once you pay for your ticket into the monsha you then go into the locker room where you strip down and put your stuff in a locker. Then you take your red tub and your soap products then go into the bathing area which is a collection of benches in a horseshoe around a fairly big room. So first you mix steaming water and cold water which come from different pipes into a good mix which you use to wash and lather yourself. In the bathing area you have up to twenty men lathering themselves with soap, shaving, and washing themselves with the water from their red buckets.

Then after you get your water and find a spot on one of the benches and entrench your soap near your water bucket. You go and steam yourself in the steam room. I will usually steam myself then wait in the locker room, cool down and drink water three times or so per monsha visit. The heat is closer to a wet moist heat of a steam room than that of the dry heat of a sauna but the room looks more like a sauna. After which you thoroughly lather yourself with soap, fill up your bucket and dump your bucket on yourself 3-4 times. Then your officially clean or at least I hope the sweat and scrubbing makes your skin clean. But after a week of grime that develops anything with water on your skin makes you feel clean.

Anyway this week when I went into to the Monsha, I did the normal routine. First I bought my water and ticket. Then I went into the locker room stripped. Then I took my bucket and soap products and went into the bathing room. Filled up my bucket full of properly mixed cold and hot water placed it on a spot on a bench, then went to the steam room for my first sweat. The first sweat is always the best all that grime that develops from a week of work, walking, and sleeping sheds so quickly. You feel like your the wicked witch of the west but you become a beautiful butterfly after. After that I went into the locker room and cooled down then went back into the bathing area and sat down.

Then for the first time ever anywhere, a pretty big old man approached me and asked, “Can you wash my back?” I was a bit stunned I not only understood his entire question but I didn’t quite understand if I should or if I didn’t would I make a cultural fopah. So erring on the side of caution I said, “ok”. There is a first time for everything right, so with his soap rag I lathered his back with a strong pressure. Then after a couple minutes I asked if that was enough and he said yes. He thanked me.

After glowing in the feeling that I had just had a pretty unique experience, I went to the steam room for another steam. In the steam room there was another older man probably 45 or so. We started chatting about how hot the monsha was today, the kind of standard small talk you’d have if you were in line in a grocery store or bank or something in California. Then after a couple minutes he asked me to scrape his back with this glove, which looks kind of like a scraping dish rag but is a shaped into glove. Since I had just scraped one old guys back, I said to myself whatever if one is good two is better and dug in for scraping. After I got down with his back he said thanks and offered to hit me with the birch leaves that every monsha in Kazakhstan has. I said no since they whack you pretty hard with those things and the scrapes probably would take 2-3 days to heal.

Well two backs and mine in one day, I was literally glowing. My cultural assimilation is going well.