Finland on Sauna

It seems impossible to imagine a trip to Finland without a trip to the sauna during your stay. A 2000 year old tradition has lasted through wars, dictators and many generations of Finns. The country has roughly 5 million inhabitants, and roughly 2 million saunas. This was our groups first experience with a traditional smoke house style Finnish sauna. What a treat!! Here is a description....

The sauna is situated in a small wood cabin structure. Inside there are the traditional wooden benches that are for sitting and the stairs to climb up to get to those perches. What makes this sauna different is the stove that is used to create the heat....there is no electric, only fire and smoke. The process started about 7am today when the owner began making the sauna ready for our arrival (we didn´t get there until about 3pm mind you). The process begins by letting the place air out and cleaning the stove clear of ash and remains from prior use. Then a fire is lit within the stove. The fire begins burning and is stoked and tended to as the day goes on. The smoke passes through the sauna structure as the fire burns. It´s essentially like lighting a camping fire in your living room. This puts a thin layer of soot all over the inside of the sauna. Once the stove (and the rocks that are covering the stove) are heated to the proper temperature (scalding ass hot) the sauna is aired out at which point any remaing smoke is cleared from the building. The fire is now out at this point. The rocks that have been heated remain hot enough to sizzle water on them for many hours (perhaps even into the next day). It´s pretty amazing the amount of heat that the stove and rocks are able to retain. The inside temperature remained a steady 80c (you do the conversion) the whole time. It´s now time to sauna. Men and women went seperate in this case as there were about 15 of us all together. The women went first while we patiently waited and enjoyed some sowty (I will spell it phenetically, but I have no idea what the word looks like. Side note, sowty is a homemade beer/drink thing that is basically fermented grains that has a color similar to beer, but has no carbonation....germans make something similar to this but the name eludes me at present....). Once they were done it was our turn. It´s kind of a funny scene watching a bunch of men (or women for that matter) strip down to sauna attire outside next to a lake in the middle of a sparsely populated ´neighborhood´, and then pile into a small room as though it´s some sort of clown car...check your modesty at the airport I guess. Anyways, once everyone is piled in someone starts tending the sauna. You drizzle water on the hot rocks creating steam that fills the room. The exchange between the steam and your skin is what creates the effect. I always thought the temperature was rising when you threw water on it (which makes no sense at all now that I think about it) and that´s where the intensity comes from....I now know that the intense sensation is from the steam.....if you have ever had your face too close to a boiling pot of water when you took the lid off you have experienced this sensation. There are stories of people dumping entire buckets of water on the stoves and having to be treated for burns as the steam essentially burns there bodies as a whole. You regulate the intensity of the whole thing with a laddle that helps you apply the water is smaller somewhat more controlled amounts. Of course they had the traditional birch branches that you use to whack yourself with to increase circulation, and there was of course the nearby lake that you could (and did) jump into to ´cool´ off (the ice finished coming off the lake yesterday) when the sauna gets too intense. As is also tradition when we had had enough of the whole process we sat around and drank more beer and sowty and talked about the sauna (in our towels) and other worldly topics of interest. In conclusion, I always thought of paradise as a tropical island populated with scantily clad danes and pints that never emptied...turns out the true haven more resembles underbudget b-list euro ´films´ in a wooded forest with glasses of cloudy homemade ale....semantics I guess.

Additional: The weather in Finland has been nice the last few days....teperatures are around 10c. The last two nights I have seen two of the most amazing sunsets I have ever seen in my life (which says a lot for someone from CO). We continue to meet fantastic people in parts of this country that no tourist ever visits, and yes, I have put on at least 5 pounds from the intake of fine Finnish foods and the occasional cold one. I guess it´s a good thing that I don´t have to try to shoe horn my ass into any sort of bathing suit on this trip.