Ever been to Moscow? Go to Moscow. My job sent me there several times over the past few years. My agency was partnered with a Moscow charitable organization so we could provide them with technical assistance to do HIV prevention work with drug users. The project was a mixed bag, but it turned out well in the end. I truly came to love the Russian people though. The like food and drinking and dancing and sunshine and snow. In fact, they have such a deep and wonderful appreciation of these simple, good things. Despite the fact that history down to the present has dealt them one losing hand after another.

The thing that will one day bring me back to Moscow--beyond the great seats for $6 at the Bolshoi Ballet, the Tretyakov Gallery, Red Square at midnight with falling snow, and the Mayakovski House Museum--is the Sandunovskii Banya (Banya + Baths). The Sandunovskii are the oldest baths in Moscow. Tchaikovsky went to the Sandunovskii. The entrance is this baroque spanish-turkish fantasmagoria. You pay the money (something like $12) and go up to the lounge. The lounge is this enormous room with a vaulted ceiling and high backed oaken benches. (If you want, you can spring for a curtained booth, but then you wouldn't get to see all the other men.) There are attendants who speak no English, so it's necessary to know the word for 'towel.' They give you as many as you need--enourmous turkish towels, but more like small bedsheets than bath towels. You strip and wrap this around yourself and head for the wet area. Big room. Sort of roman-bathish in design. Doric columns and such. You shower down to clean yourself off, then head for the sauna. The sauna. Blazing hot. Eyebrows singe. Your first time in the sauna, you can maybe last 45 seconds. Then, you head through the big shower room to the 'cold pool' opposite. The cold pool (again sort of classically inspired look to it) is water kept at about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's cold. I prefer to dive in. Absolutely invigorating. Then back to the sauna, which you're now able to tolerate for a somewhat longer time. This gives you more time to notice your fellow sauna-takers. I swear, every time I was there, the Russian Army Wrestling Team was there. All these big, bearish Russian men... flagellating themselves and one another with birch branches. I mean, really going at it. The birch is a natural astringent, so it's good for the skin. And whipping yourself in the blazing heat gets the endorphins pumping. The birch leaves and sap turn the cold pool this amazing blue-green. So it's sauna to cold pool to sauna to cold pool. Eventually, you get to the point where you feel you could sit in the sauna or the cold pool forever. You've whipped your body into submission. You're relaxed. The feeling is incredible. You're floating. So blissful. All is well with the world.

Then you shower off, and head back to the lounge. You sit there and the kind attendants bring you food and drink. Salmon and blini. Chilled vodka, whatever. My preference was a bottle of mineralnay voda (mineral water) and chaya (tea). The tea is served with slices of lemon and honey. And so I would just sit there naked, smoking, totally blissed out, with all the other naked, smoking, toally blissed out enormous Russian men.

"Anything go on there?" is the question inevitably posed by my homo friends when I recount the pleasures of the Sandunovskii. Nothing genital, as far as I could tell. But that would be soooo totally beside the point. I mean, there you are, naked with these huge guys, your endorphins bathing your brain, in these beautiful surroundings. And this is somehow incomplete if somebody isn't caressing your tumescent dick? Puh-leeze.

The Muslim belief that martyrs go to paradise and are waited upon by fifty virgins was held up for ridicule in the US media in the wake of September 11th. Sort of viewed as being unsophisticated or something. I would much rather spend all of eternity in the Sandunovskii Banya than wave my palm branch before the throne of the lamb who was slain.