101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [60]
This existential approach to geography might help save the state the trouble of relocating the monument, but it also makes the entire experience seem a bit arbitrary. If any place can become Four Corners, why not just take a picture of your kid squatting on the intersection of a different set of perpendicular lines—like on a sidewalk—and visit Mesa Verde instead?
Daniel Peverini
Chapter 98
Russia’s Prison OE-256/5
Okay, so prison isn’t high on many travelers’ life lists to begin with. But nonetheless, you should take special care never to land yourself in Russia’s Prison No. OE-256/5, a hellhole otherwise known as Petak.
Like Alcatraz, Petak is on an island in a beautiful setting—in this case, Russia’s White Lake. But unlike Alcatraz, it’s still open for business. Petak is home to 170 or so of the country’s most dangerous prisoners, and everything about it is designed to break their wills and destroy their spirits.
Prisoners are kept in cramped two-person cells for about twenty-two hours a day. For the rest of the time, they’re allowed to pace back and forth in small outdoor cages—their only form of exercise. Prisoners are allowed two two-hour visits for the first ten years of their sentences. If they misbehave, they’re put into a dark cell, empty except for a bucket and a fold-down bed, for fifteen days. Forget about books or entertainment—parcels are only allowed twice a year and, according to London’s Telegraph, half the population has tuberculosis.
Anyone who tries to escape would either drown or be shot. But then, considering the effect Petak has on people, perhaps that’s not a bad option. “After three or four years their personalities begin to deteriorate,” the prison’s psychologist told the Telegraph reporter. “There is no way anyone can spend twenty-five years in a place like this without being psychologically destroyed.”
Chapter 99
A Bikram Yoga Studio
Walk into a Bikram studio—a branch of yoga that requires the room to be heated to 105 degrees at 40 percent humidity—and you’ll be hit in the face with a steamy cloud of sweat and body odor so powerful that you’ll be tempted to throw up.
Good thing there are sanitation standards for yoga studios, right? Wrong. There are none—a fact I’m reminded of every time I catch a whiff of Funky Door Yoga, a dog-friendly Bikram studio that, as all Bikram studios are required to do, carpeted its floor. That’s bad news for my gag reflex, but it’s great for the hundreds of thousands of bacteria that live in every yoga studio, sharing space on mats and blankets with dust mites, parasites, fungi, and viruses.
According to Philip M. Tierno, PhD, director of clinical microbiology at New York University Langone Medical Center, “Eighty percent of disease is caught by direct or indirect contact—either interacting with a person who carries germs or touching a surface where those organisms live.” So let’s see: you’ve got a moist, warm room populated by sickness-causing organisms that are spread by touch. Why bother with a yoga class? Just head to the hospital and lick some open wounds.
In addition to respiratory infections, things you can get from your downward-facing dog range from skin afflictions like athlete’s foot, ringworm, and plantar warts to staphylococcus, a bacteria carried by more than 30 percent of people that can enter your body through a tiny cut or scratch and, if you’re unlucky enough to get a drug-resistant strain, can kill you.
You can protect yourself by washing your hands, sanitizing your mat, and wearing a long-sleeved shirt, socks, and pants to class (everyone’s outfit of choice when exercising in a rain forest). Or, alternatively, if you want an excuse to stay home from work, do Bikram in your bathing suit—an upsettingly common practice—and spend a few