Temperatures in DC have soared into numbers I previously associated with roasting chickens. 111° F with humidity. My car gets so hot that I need to get driving gloves before I leave my finger tips on the steering wheel. I drove to work one morning with the seat heaters on and didn’t even notice.
It doesn’t help that the Founding Fathers built Washington on a swamp. Maybe Jefferson - the orginal champion of small government - hoped the mosquitos and typhoid would stop the nation’s capital from getting too big. He didn’t count on four million air conditioned commuters every morning. DC has the biggest daily population change of any city on earth.
They reverse the traffic flow on the major arteries during rush hour. This is rarely as well sign-posted as you might hope. I played chicken with a bovine SUV on Connecticut Avenue one evening shortly after two of the lanes had switched. I was pretty sure I was right, but it’s hard to communicate when you are approaching one another at 60 miles an hour and she’s on the phone.
I was looking forward to escaping the humidity and dangers of DC with a weekend in New York. But it only got hotter and more violent. Some friends took me to a Russian Bathhouse on the Lower East Side. I swapped my wallet and watch for a pair of light blue surgical cut offs and a threadbare towel and followed them into the basement. The sauna and steamroom were pretty standard, but the “radiant heat room” was breathtaking. NASA trains robots for those kind of conditions.
Despite mixed advice, I decided to pay $30 for a massage from Sergei, whose skull looked like it had been vacuum packed in his skin. Lying down on the top tier, above the other half dozen sagging bodies, Sergei wrapped my head in the sanctuary of a wet towel, and proceeded to scrub, douse, bend, pummel and press my sweaty corpse until you could have breaded me and called me a schnitzel. Occassionally, he’d lift a corner of the towel and bark “OK” at me, then drop it before I gasped a response.
The massage was followed by a cardiac inducing plunge into an icy pool after which Sergei swaddles me in towels and checked my pulse at my neck. He nodded curt approval. “Very strong,” shaking my hand, “Strong man.” I felt I deserved my can of Baltika on the roof terrace after that.
It doesn’t help that the Founding Fathers built Washington on a swamp. Maybe Jefferson - the orginal champion of small government - hoped the mosquitos and typhoid would stop the nation’s capital from getting too big. He didn’t count on four million air conditioned commuters every morning. DC has the biggest daily population change of any city on earth.
They reverse the traffic flow on the major arteries during rush hour. This is rarely as well sign-posted as you might hope. I played chicken with a bovine SUV on Connecticut Avenue one evening shortly after two of the lanes had switched. I was pretty sure I was right, but it’s hard to communicate when you are approaching one another at 60 miles an hour and she’s on the phone.
I was looking forward to escaping the humidity and dangers of DC with a weekend in New York. But it only got hotter and more violent. Some friends took me to a Russian Bathhouse on the Lower East Side. I swapped my wallet and watch for a pair of light blue surgical cut offs and a threadbare towel and followed them into the basement. The sauna and steamroom were pretty standard, but the “radiant heat room” was breathtaking. NASA trains robots for those kind of conditions.
Despite mixed advice, I decided to pay $30 for a massage from Sergei, whose skull looked like it had been vacuum packed in his skin. Lying down on the top tier, above the other half dozen sagging bodies, Sergei wrapped my head in the sanctuary of a wet towel, and proceeded to scrub, douse, bend, pummel and press my sweaty corpse until you could have breaded me and called me a schnitzel. Occassionally, he’d lift a corner of the towel and bark “OK” at me, then drop it before I gasped a response.
The massage was followed by a cardiac inducing plunge into an icy pool after which Sergei swaddles me in towels and checked my pulse at my neck. He nodded curt approval. “Very strong,” shaking my hand, “Strong man.” I felt I deserved my can of Baltika on the roof terrace after that.
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