The Bathroom & The Banya (Day 3)

The Joneses live in a village of roughly 8,000 in which there are probably two or three homes with an indoor toilet. Luckily, the Joneses live in one of those homes. Despite having a toilet and bathroom sink, the home does not have indoor plumbing. So how does it work?

Well... All of the Joneses water comes from a well (which luckily has a motorized pump). They have a hose from their well pulled through a kitchen window. This is the well.

The hose from the well is long enough to reach their 50-gallon tank in the bathroom (but it doesn't stay there permanantly, it's only stretched there when the tank needs to be refilled). This tank provides the water for the toilet and the bathroom sink.

In theory and basic set-up, it works fine. In reality and actuality, it doesn't work as conveniently or thoroughly as it sounds. Because of one or the other or a combination of both:

(a) a backup in the tank or pipe to the toilet and sink, or
(b) a lack of pressure,

the flow of water from the tank is about as fast as a leaky faucet. The water usually begins running as a strong solid drip, but quickly wanes to a slow, nearly non-existent one. As you can probably imagine, it takes a long time to fill the toilet tank back up. The solution is that you only flush the toilet when necessary and most of the time you simply use some water from a bucket to splash into the toilet. Because all the contents of the toilet are going into a hole dug deep below the house, this works out fine.

This is the bathroom water tank and the toilet, you may want to note, the water tank for the toilet is attached the wall and not the actual toilet bowl:

The sink and toilet (the orange scoop on the ledge above the sink is the scoop used for the bathroom bucket of water):

The door to the bathroom is this cloth, which is pulled like this when the bathroom is not in use (The previously mentioned bucket of water is at the bottom of the picture). The owner built this bathroom in a portion of the kitchen when his father was living so that he wouldn't have to go outside into the cold. We were grateful for his thoughtfulness!

The Joneses also have an outhouse, but we chose not to use it. This is what everyone else in the village has and uses.



The Banya
To give us the full village-life experience, (as well as let us get clean after traveling for two days) the Joneses planned for banya while we were there. Banya?? Russian banya that is. The Russians have their own style of sauna and it is often used not just for rest & relaxation, but... getting clean!

This is their banya house, separate from the rest of the house:
This is Nathan Jones showing us where he puts the wood for the banya. In order to get the banya good and hot for the big night he had to spend practically all day filling up the water, working on the fire, etc. He has to set aside a whole day each time they do banya... I bet you never thought or imagined that bathing could be so time consuming or work involved.

A closer look at that hearth of sorts...
This is what is on the other side of that wall! This is the heater for the banya room. To get the room nice and steamy you take a scoop of cold water from one of the basins in the room and pour it onto the heater (placement is pretty key if you don't want to be burned), Nathan directed us to pour the water on the area of the "heater" closest to the wall (not pictured), the area on the other side of the spicket, or the area near the front, sortof under the spicket.

When you are in the banya room you sit on one of these benches and steam. When you start getting too hot you can either leave the room and go into the prebanya room (where you saw Nathan with the firewood), run outside and flail in the snow (unfortunately the weather didn't accommodate for this experience ;D), or dump cold water from one of the basins all over yourself. Because I'm a chicken I used hot water from the heater spicket to warm up the basin of water I used. Even so it was still quite a shocker to feel that cool water in the midst of the burning hot room.
This next picture mostly gives a good scope of the room in its entirety. Barely visible on the upper right of the picture is a grouping of leaves. This is called a venik. When using a dried venik you soak it in water and then you beat yourself with it while you are in the banya. And it feels good--it feels nice and tingly but doesn't actually hurt. Apparently the venik helps bring your blood to the surface and open up your pores. When you are all red you then soak yourself in the cold water.

We all really enjoyed banya. Our family took our turn first when the banya wasn't yet terribly warm, for Addie's sake. She, of course, loved sitting in her own little basin of warm water splashing to her hearts content and protested when we took her out. Nathan and Heather dressed her for bed while we finished our own banyas.

I can't say that I'm very good at banya (it really does require some training and endurance) but it was a lot of fun. Before my experience I was told that I would feel more clean in a way I had never felt before, and I'll admit, I was a little skeptical. I was a little unsure about the simultaneous sweating and becoming clean thing, as I've been an athlete and I've lived in immense humidity and know that you can still feel gross after a shower if your body is all hot and sweaty, rather than cooled down, when you enter a shower. I've only experienced banya once and certainly can't explain or even describe how it works, I don't think I even really understand it, but it somehow just feels like you've been cleaned from the inside out.