I'm pretty sure that you can expect something like this: (NSFW...or kids...or the squeamish)

https://vimeo.com/164521822

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"100% of the people who confuse correlation and causation end up dying."

please do this and report back.

Lie down while in the Russian Room and a platza specialist will scrub you (actually beat you) with a broom made of fresh oak leaves, sopping with olive oil soap. The oak leaves contain a natural astringent, which will open your pores, remove toxins, and actually take off layers of dead skin. Some described the platza as "Jewish acupuncture".

Probably going to need it after the junk flying all over the place throw down I just recently learned I would be experiencing..

Didn't someone famous recently get in trouble for going to one of these places?

I went to a bath house in San Francisco.

Make sure you have plenty of towels and bring your own lube.

And knee pads.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

Have you seen a grown man naked?

Went to a Russian bath in Moscow and one in Brighton Beach. Both offered you the option to get a felt hat like the one pictured below to wear while in the sauna - you can put it on dry, or get it wet before donning it for a more steamy heat. I tried both approaches at the place in NYC, and they both made an already very warm experience even warmer. So if you like being super heated or are just looking for an experience, give one a try.

Also, one of the friends I went with to the one in NYC was a regular visitor there. He had one visit where an old Korean dude asked my friend in very broken English to shave the back of the Korean dude's neck in the locker room. My buddy loves weird, uncomfortable interactions like that so he did it. So, for whatever that's worth...I guess be prepared to have an elderly foreigner ask you to help him with personal grooming.

I witnessed this at a Russian bath in Moscow. It was interesting/vaguely intimidating. The sauna was huge - it had 3 or four tiers of seats and probably could hold 50-60 people. On the bottom level there was a table, like a massage table. A guest came in, laid down on the table completely naked, face down.

2 minutes later an employee came in, wearing only '70's style short gym shorts and a pair of gardening gloves. He had a bucket of branches/leaves - I don't think they were oak, they were birch I think. Dude grabbed a handful of branches in each hand and started working the guest over, first lightly brushing him but working up to full on, Pete Townsend style windmill lashes up and down the guest's back, legs and only kinda/sorta avoiding the ass. Then the guest turned over and got the same treatment on his ventral side, again with what looked like some glancing birch branch blows to the groin. The employee was hitting him so hard the employee was visibly out of breath by the end of the session.

At the end, one of the Russians sitting near me saw me watching the whole thing and just said simply "is good hangover cure".

so besides the steam you're inhaling bits of sweaty, toxic, flailed skin. Pass the vodka!

Do you like movies about Gladiators?

Correct!

We actually got a vodka shot right before we left the bathhouse, but there were dudes doing shots in between cycles of sauna and dunking in 35 degree and 60 degree cool off pools. I was in my 20's and in very good shape, and still the combo of dehydration, hot/cold cycles and a shot of booze made my heart race a little and got me pretty light-headed. I don't know how those old, overweight some-definitely-alcoholic-looking Russians were doing it and not dying from heart attacks.

based on where this thread has gone I definitely picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue..

I want you to know, we’re all counting on you.

Surely you can’t be serious?

I did not do the platza but did thoroughly enjoy 2 hours of rotating through various degrees of fahrenheit (freedom temps). Favorite was the legit Russian Sauna room followed by the cold pool (48f). Really enjoyed the clientele as well. Everything from very old asian women who were MUCH more hardcore than me to young yittish guys talking NYC real estate. A lot of that is me missing living in Chicago. Felt good being around so many different types of people again.

I did do the little hat and robe for about the first 45 minutes until I decided that it was fucking nuts wearing those things in a 200f+ (if I had to guess I would say 210-215f but that's a guess) Russian sauna room. To put that into context, at one point, I jumped directly from that into the "normal" sauna (which is what I'm used to) at 180 degrees...did not even feel hot.

Outside of the combo of extreme hot/cold being the most refreshing second place goes to dumping ice cold buckets of water over my head in the Russian sauna...felt amazing.

So no one tried to stab me, no sexy propositions that would necessitate knee pads and lube (Duffy), everyone had at least shorts on since it was coed hours, and I got a short history lesson on the place from a local english professor who also moonlights as a local tourist guide (evidently this was once one hell of a local mob meeting location which included all deaf masseuses). Overall I give my first experience a solid A.

Lastly I did not stay long enough to glimpse "Bannik the Slavic Bathhouse Spirit" so I could have done it all wrong..