Photo. Saunas are found widely around in forests in summer cottages.
The traditional sauna is a wooden building where the bathers sit on benches splashing water on hot stones of the stove and gently beating themselves with leafy birch whisks.
A guest who reject the invitation of taking a sauna should bear in mind that is has been heated especially for him or she. It`s a matter of pride for the host, and this is the way Finns show their best hospitality.
When you go to Finland, you should be prepared to be invitated to a sauna. Then you have to take off all your clothes and go to a little room heated to almost 100 Cº. There you will sit, naked, with others for a while and sweat, sometimes together with people with opposite sex. Then you will go outside and jump (still naked) out in the cool water in lake. I find the best way to do it in lakes deep in the forests, where there are no other people. Just swarms of bloodthirsty mosqoitos, elks - moose, and reindeers.
In the winter you would have the plesaure to jump down in a small hole in the ice on a lake. The sea or whatever and refresh yourselves in the freezing water - or roll in the snow instead.
The Finns are very proud of there Sauna. There are lot of saunas in the Finns` summer cottages. It is a traditional Finnish dream to own a summer cottage beside a lake (which we also have thousands of). There are some 200,000 summer cottages in the country, which is a lot, because there are only 5 million of us Finns here. So many families have their own cottages and you can also rent cottages. And in the peace of your own summer cottage you don't have to worry about clothes.
You go to sauna in the nude, you dip into the lake for a swim in the nude and you greet the others having a barbecue in the nude while returning from the lake to the sauna. It is so strikingly commonplace that we would form a big thoughtbubble over our heads saying "What?" with a really weird expression on our faces if someone said that we were nudists. And if someone accused us of being perverts or something, that one would have to be foreign since no Finn would say that, and to the foreign we would try to explain about our customs, that they are nothing of a sexual nature or like that.
The traditional sauna is a wooden building where the bathers sit on benches splashing water on the hot stones of the stove and gently beating themselves with leafy birch whisks. Sauna', the most commonly borrowed Finnish word, has spread from Finnish to several world languages, although the Finns believe not always in its original sense.
The expression to have a sauna' covers the whole bathing process and includes several repeated periods of perspiring in the heat and the steam, known as löyly, produced by the water thrown on the stones. Löyly is described as the spirit of the sauna. It is a Finno-Ugric word going back 7,000 years.
Nuditiy is definitely not considered as barbaric, but natural in Finland. People are borned naked, so why should people be ashamed to show their body? To be naked has also another purpose. Wearing a swimsuit or something is very unhygienic. You need to be aware of that in public saunas, swimming pools and spas it`s not allowed to wear any shorts, swimming cap, towels and other things. You have to be bare naked - just as you were no born, and then you can experience the special social bounds together with the Finns.
Do we look better with cloths than without? There is the best way to get the Finns in sauna. The first-time intimacy with new acquaintances, will build relations easier and quicker.
I can ensure you that after leaving the sauna, you will be more relaxed, you minded will be cleared and good emotions will come.
Stein Morten Lund, 24 July 2006
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