Living in the lap of luxury
12.02.2008
Well, my mom is now a spa addict, so I bought her a gift certificate for a Russia spa in Quebec City for Christmas. It is called Izba. I guess mom wanted me to come and experience the spa with her, so we split the money and went all out for an "Izba Special" for me and an "anti-aging facial" for my mom.
I asked the lady at the counter exactly what the Izba special entailed, but all I could catch was that it involved something about leaves and honey and a 60 minute massage. Sounded good to me, hook me up!
The lady, who will soon put me through 30 minutes of agony and 60 minutes of extreme bliss meets me in the lounge area, where I am sipping orangeade (that I'm pretty sure contains extreme diuretics).
She takes me into the basement, where there is a jacuzzi, and a cold bath. First, she rubs my entire (naked) body down with a really intense body scrub while laying on the cedar planks in a hot hot hot sauna. I wash it off, and then I am supposed to go into the warm water for one minute, and then the cool water for 30 seconds, FIVE TIMES.
"OK, no," I think.
I only make it about three times, and then she comes back and has me lay back down in the sauna. Just as it is about to feel extremely nice, out of the blue, she starts smacking me with what can only be described as BUSHES OF SEAWEED. OK, whatever, this is fine, I think. I have seen like, Swedish massages before and it's pretty much the same thing (from what I've seen on TV, haha). Anyway, her next move is even more diabolical. She rubs my whole body with warm honey and just when I am feeling perfectly relaxed, everywhere, she POURS COLD WATER ALL OVER. Imagine this, in a sauna. Just imagine how awful that feels.
Anyway, after that is finally over, I dry off and then she massages me for an hour, and it makes up for it. Or so I think. Little do I know, that later on that night, I will come down with a stuffy nosed cold. Arg...
After my mom finishes her facial, dad meets us and we go to the Museum of Civilization. Right now, they have a cool exhibit on dragons and also, a permanent exhibit on the history of Quebec. It was pretty cool, I especially liked the "curiosity tables" where it shows regular animals that were preserved, then made to look like "mini dragons" and sold to rich people in the early 20th century. Awesome.
We got kicked out at about 5 p.m. and so we had to go to dinner and hang out there until our table was ready. This dinner was also on me, because I had bought my dad a gift certificate at Laurie Raphael for Christmas. It's arguably one of the best contemporary venues in the city. I'm not going to go into details, but dinner involved a lot of "tartar" and "beet foam". Needless to say, delicious. I'm not going to go into all the many ways my dad proceeded to embarrass me in front of a whole bunch of pretentious foodies, but it was countless. I will be buying dad a gift certificate at The Keg next year, I think.
I had started to feel like utter and total crap somewhere in the middle of our museum visit, so we went back to the hotel right after dinner, and I tried (unsuccessfully) to get a good night's sleep.
