Rainy day blues

36 degrees Fahrenheit, or +2, as we say here in the rest of the world that uses the metric system, and raining. Those were the conditions just about all day today, and I have to say I feel betrayed by the weather. After several weeks of more snow than one has a right to expect, the pendulum has swung the other way, and it is unseasonably warm.

Luckily, according to Weather.com's Moscow forecast, it looks like we still have a chance for a white Christmas on December 25th. What the weather will be like by the time most Russians celebrate Christmas on January 7th is anyone's guess, but it doesn't much interest me, since by that time we plan to be in the midst of a Florida vacation.

This morning I went outside to hail a car to get me to the banya and was confronted with the effects of higher oil costs - when I started going to the banya a year ago, I could always get a car for 50 rubles (a little less than $2), even if that meant I had to stop a few cars before finding one to take me to our favorite Sunday morning banya, about a 15-minute drive from home. Today, the best deal I could get was 120 rubles, and everyone was asking for 150.

My "cabbie" (I use the quotation marks because I never use actual taxis for personal trips, but negotiate with the first car that stops when I stick my arm out at curbside - usually these are middle-aged Russian guys moonlighting using their own beat-up cars or killing downtime on the job using the car in which they usually drive around their boss) on the way there was a banya aficionado - he was 50 if he was a day, and he said he had been going to the banya ever since his dad took him there as a kid. I could tell he was a true banya lover - in it for the natural high - when he talked about how you should never drink anything in the banya but mint tea. It is remarkable, really, how "banya" is in so many cases a euphemism for a place to get plastered with your buddies (taking the steam is secondary for such groups), or a brothel - these tendencies just give other banya-goers a bad name.

Anyway, we steamed and sweated, beat ourselves with birch branches in the parilka (steam room) and jumped into an ice-cold pool of water; and then, as is the custom with this group of banya-goers, made our way to Druzhba, the best Chinese restaurant in town, for a long and hearty lunch.

Afterward, I was feeling lazy and decided to flag a car to get home. Usually I take the metro, but I didn't have the energy for that, or I walk when the weather is nice, but the rain had already started so that was out. I got home for 100 rubles, and again had a chatty driver. He was lamenting the weather, and, proving that Moscow's gypsy cabbies are not of one mind about anything except the evils of higher gasoline prices and traffic cops, he suggested a different use for the banya - "Yes," he said bitterly, "This kind of weather is only good for sitting in the banya and drinking vodka."