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Russian Dinner
Feb. 11th, 2011 12:49 amOne of my Russian profs invited us all to dinner at her house, and we had cabbage pie and some sort of Georgian soup and played Russian scrabble (or totally failed to play Russian scrabble) and hung out in the banya in her backyard.
I've never been in a banya before. At first it was about 80 degrees Celsius and all of us Americans were more or less instantly prostrate, while the Belarusian exchange student sprawled across the shelf and murmured that it was entirely too cool. But fear not! The temperature inched up toward 90, and she was pleased, even as the rest of us gasped in the searing air until, in a fit of heat-induced insanity, we raced outside to roll around naked in the snow.
Fun fact: when you run out of a banya into the cold, cold air, your skin mists like a river at dawn.
Also, my professor gave us old tea canisters, tall and thin and decorated with pictures by Waterhouse and Leighton and Alma-Tadema, all of whom I love, because my taste in art is terrible. I wanted to use mine as a postcard receptacle, but alas, it is to narrow, so I suppose I need to come up with another use for it. Any ideas? So far I've come up with pocky holder.
I've never been in a banya before. At first it was about 80 degrees Celsius and all of us Americans were more or less instantly prostrate, while the Belarusian exchange student sprawled across the shelf and murmured that it was entirely too cool. But fear not! The temperature inched up toward 90, and she was pleased, even as the rest of us gasped in the searing air until, in a fit of heat-induced insanity, we raced outside to roll around naked in the snow.
Fun fact: when you run out of a banya into the cold, cold air, your skin mists like a river at dawn.
Also, my professor gave us old tea canisters, tall and thin and decorated with pictures by Waterhouse and Leighton and Alma-Tadema, all of whom I love, because my taste in art is terrible. I wanted to use mine as a postcard receptacle, but alas, it is to narrow, so I suppose I need to come up with another use for it. Any ideas? So far I've come up with pocky holder.
