all hail the finnish sauna!
It's been both a joy and an honor to be so warmly welcomed to Finland and given what feels like a backstage pass—a kind-of intimate right to witness and inherit Finnish national culture. I'm filled with a swelling-of-the-chest, profound sense of gratitude on a near daily basis. Of the plentiful gifts I feel I've been granted by this distinctly special country, one of my favorites is sauna.
If you've ever done some quick, surface-level internet surfing about Finland, it's likely that you've read about sauna as a common cultural practice. You also likely read that in the country of only 5.5 million people there are ~3 million saunas. There's even a sauna in the Finnish Parliament building! While the numbers alone indicate the relevance and significance of sauna, I'm here to proclaim sauna as one of the most important cultural pillars of Finnish life. I'm also here, with much less dramatic flair, to share with you how awesome it is. In six months, the practice of sauna, which began as an infrequent and fun way to embrace my new home, has become a thrice weekly and integral component of my life.
I feel the best way to demonstrate my love for sauna is to walk you through today's sauna. Visualize with me:
On Mondays and Wednesdays I walk ~7 minutes to Vierula, a sauna for university students situated on the shore of Lake Saimaa. On a winter evening like today my walk is a bundled up, unlit gallivant through the snow, fresh and glimmering. Upon arrival, the first challenge is climbing out of a down jacket and two layers of pants and stripping down to your swimmy in -20°C. While nakedness—believed to be the most pure and sanitary—is the traditional dress code, swimsuits are required in the student sauna. Once adequately dressed and goosebumped, you walk into the shower area for a rinse to cleanse. The sauna is dimly lit, with a long window offering a lake view (if the sun is still up), and has a wood-y, birch scent I've come to relish in. Finnish saunas are all heated via löyly, the steam produced from tossing water on hot stones. The splash and sizzle of the water on the rocks is mmmmm so good. If available, I like to settle in to one of the small wooden room's corners, unless I've been bestowed the honor and pressure of water-tossing duty. After 20 minutes or so, it's REALLY hot and you're REALLY sweaty. Here's where the fun begins! Now, bikini-clad and steaming, you casually, its-no-big-deal, i-come-here-often, brave the arctic winter and tiptoe down to the lake dock. In today's case, the previously carved ice-hole has frozen over again, but luckily we've been given the gift of fresh snowfall. Now, we scamper out onto the frozen lake past the snow angels of ere and go for our own roll-around! Amidst the brutal and biting cold, the singular experience of running out on a frozen lake in my swimsuit and snow-angeling was today's source of the visceral and radiant gratitude I mentioned earlier.
We then rinse (literally) and repeat this cycle 3 more times. On my walk home I'm re-bundled, pink-cheeked, and feeling so good.
While I usually go to sauna with friends, in an otherwise reserved and private country, it's not uncommon to strike up conversation with your fellow sauna-goers. You get extra street cred if you take a dip in the frozen lake. So you leave the experience having learned something new or heard a new language (lots of international students!), and also having given your body and mind a therapy session. Talk about a win-win!
For me, sauna has been a gateway to the Finnish cultural values of resilience (sisu), nature, and wellbeing. One of my favorite parts of being here is getting to witness the way Finnish cultural values are acted out in the everyday lives of Finns—it's honest, earnest, and commonsensical.
