Tales from a Russian spa

Lunching at the weekend with a female friend recently returned from a month of globe-trotting, we found ourselves exchanging tales of day spas we’d visited in far flung places.

“Monica and I found one in St Petersburg mostly through guess work,” she told me. “It took a couple of tries because they alternate male/female days and we had no way of checking before we got there which day was which. Eventually we walked into a reception room full of semi-clad women and realised we’d found the right place.”

It was an unusual experience.

“We didn’t have a word of Russian between us and the staff didn’t speak English. We paid our way in and walked into a locker room where a huge Russian mama frowned at us til we stripped off.

“No one else seemed to have towels so we went straight into the steam room where there were three or four other women. Each one was holding a birch stick and ritually slapping herself with it, up the arms, down the legs, up the stomach and down the back. They were giving us strange looks from the corner of their eyes and it didn’t take us long to realise that being without a birch stick was making us look a bit weird. But when we went back into the changing room the Russian mama had vanished with our locker keys! We had no choice but to go back out to the main reception and try to express through the medium of mime that we wanted two birch sticks and that towels would be quite nice too.

“I’m pretty sure they knew what we wanted from the start but who’d turn up the opportunity to laugh at naked charades?”

I retaliated with my tale of being rolled in black mud and having it washed off under a hose pipe by a Marrakesh woman who was almost certainly an army drill sergeant in her spare time, but it didn’t quite beat the Russian mimes.

“Were the birch sticks worth it?” I asked.

She looked thoughtful. “Actually, they were pretty good.”

Flagellation in the name of self-improvement: perhaps there’s something in it after all?