An authentic Russian experience

The place and time to shop for souvenirs in Moscow is weekends in Ismailovsky Park. It's huge. And you can buy anything there. Shaving cream? Check. Used Soviet military pilot uniforms? Check? T-shirts? Check. Religious icons looted from churches? Check. Everything from the tackiest tourist crap to genuinely good original art.

And if you're looking for matrushkas, the nested wooden Russian dolls, there are thousands of styles available, traditional ones, and not-so-traditional ones painted like the Simpsons or the New York Yankees. Or one set which had Bill Clinton, with the smaller nested dolls all representing the women he had affairs with.

I would have liked to buy one of the icons, but I wasn't sure I'd be allowed to get it out of the country. Of course, market merchants will tell you just about anything to get you to buy their wares, so I knew it was a bad idea when the guy said, 'Yes, this will be problem.'

But I did buy a hand-painted poster from 1934 for the film 'Battleship Potemkin', which I'm really excited about. Although I haven't figured out yet how to get it home...

After doing the touristy thing I had my most authentic Russian experience. I went a banya, or public bath house.

I thought Nicaragua was hot. I thought the Sahara Desert was hot. The banya was so hot it was actually painful. It felt hot enough to melt lead but I'm told the temperature is only somewhere between 175 and 190 degrees Fahrenheit.

It's something I wanted to do, but was warned I shouldn't do without a companion who speaks Russian. My French friend Francois from the hostel speaks Russian, and had been, and agreed to go with me. I'm glad he did.

It's not that I would have felt uncomfortable as a tourist. The signs were in Russian and English. It's just that I would have never figured out the procedure!

You pay to get in -- a lot -- and go upstairs to the dressing area. You put your stuff in a locker, disrobe, then shower before entering the banya. You know how it feels walking from an air-conditioned room into the sunlight on a hot summer day? Walking into the steam room is like walking from an air-conditioned room into the sun itself.

You walk up the steps and sit on a wooden bench. The further you walk up, the hotter it gets. In fact, it's noticeably hotter if you simply stand up. Francois and I lasted two minutes on the top bench. When you get hot, you leave the steam room and get into a pool or tub of cold water. Then you repeat two or three times.

There are bundles of birch twigs lying around. Only birch. I'm not sure why. You douse them in water and take them into the steam room. To magnify the cleansing effect of the heat you smack your body with the birch twigs. All the locals do it, so we did it. I was skeptical, but it did produce a tingling sensation in addition to the feeling that my skin was cooking and peeling off.

For the Russians, it just can't get hot enough in there. I expected a pile of hot stones like you see in a sauna at a gym in the US. But there was a massive wood-burning stove about the size of a toll booth into which the locals would toss pail after pail of water. Then one of them would wave his towel around his head to disperse the heat. And then I would get up and go hop in the cold pool.

There is a bar, and in the dressing area groups of men sit around in their towels -- or out of them -- and drink beer or vodka and talk and watch sports. You go in the steam room, socialize a bit, then go back to the steam room.

This probably goes without saying, but no, I didn't take any pictures.

It was quite uncomfortable at times but quite relaxing. I can see how it could become a ritual. I feel like a wet noodle. I expect to sleep well tonight.