Careful What You Wish For

Not long ago I expressed a yearning for hot water. We had it for a while last weekend, but we had to leave town to get it.

We spent the weekend at our country dacha, which is a rustic home about 50 kilometers from here. Although we didn’t have the luxury of flush toilets, we did have filtered well water and an instant hot water heater in the kitchen.

Having hot water in the kitchen was great, but how about in the bath? Well, at a Russian dacha there is often a separate “banya.” Ours is shown in the accompanying photo. The banya is something like a Scandinavian sauna. 

Picture a winter scene where hardy people are super-heated in a sauna or a banya, and then run out into the snow. Now picture a sweltering summer day with the temperature hovering over 90 degrees. There’s no place to get cool. Would you like to get even hotter?

It was with misgivings that I agreed to use the banya. The outer room, the one for relaxing, was perhaps 95 degrees from the heat seeping in from the other rooms. We could sit in the first room for a while and listen to music CD’s while having a drink of one kind or another, which we might have done in cooler weather. This time we went straight on into the bathing room. Vats of water were there for us, some hot and some cold. We mixed according to our own preferences and soaped up thoroughly. We were busy enough that we didn’t mind that the heat had crept up to more than 110 Fahrenheit. Once we were clean we stepped into the last room. The heat hit me like a wall. I asked Slava what the temperature was, and he replied that it was over 95. “It feels hotter than that!” I corrected him. “Shirl, that’s 95 degrees Celsius,” he said. And in his usual quick way he calculated Tf = 9/5Tc +32 and told me that the temperature was 203 degrees Fahrenheit.  

Let me tell you what happened next. My own internal circuitry for temperature sensitivity got fried. When we stepped out of the banya, the 90 degree air felt positively cool. And for the next 24 hours my body sensors continued to compare ambient temperature to the banya experience.

So, when you’re feeling hot and sweaty, try getting hotter and sweatier. It feels so good when you return to just hot and sweaty!