Banya thoughts

The steam room

    1. The big thing about the Archimedes steam room is the steam.
    2. When you walk into the steam room, you apologize silently. Because, when you opened that door, you definitely let steam out of that room. And so you walk in and there's like this original sin to entering the steam room. And then there's nowhere to sit.
    3. There's this awkward, "I guess I'll stand, because there's not much space to sit", when there's maybe one space but it's up for debate. You don't want to rub your butt on somebody, so you choose to stand, until someone's like, "if you'd like to sit down, you can sit here." If you're lucky.
    4. And so then you sit, and then you're wondering, is there enough steam in here? Because the answer's probably no, there's not enough steam in there.
    5. There are two ways of getting more steam into the room. There is a button on the outside that is the power button to the steam room, I think. I don't know. Then there is this weird metal nipple on the wall inside the steam room. It isn't a button, it's more like a metal prong that sticks out of the wall. But with some black magic, if you put your finger on the nipple, it most of the time will let steam out. And then sometimes it doesn't, and I haven't figured that part out yet either.
    6. But since you're not sitting next to the nipple, you would have to ask the guy sitting under it to touch it. But then you wonder, why hasn't he? Does he even know about it? Like, okay, I think there's not enough steam in here, but I don't want to, like, ask to put more steam in here if anyone here is, like, about to die from heat exhaustion. And you don't know if anyone's about to die from heat exhaustion, so you don't ask. Instead, you just sit there and kind of, like, wait to see which one wins. Like, does the steam turn on? Does someone ask to turn on the steam? Do you get impatient enough to ask to turn on the steam and risk killing somebody from heat exhaustion? Or does the steam just turn on on its own because it's on a timer? So you're caught in this sort of, like, hell, but it's, like, a very relaxing.
    7. So it's usually safe to ask. It's also just safe because you're just safe because you're just asking somebody a simple question. But you feel like you're gonna get shot in the face for asking. So you ask politely, like a Japanese shopkeeper.