The snow has finally arrived and it came at exactly the right time too, since I was beginning to doubt in the notoriousness of harsh Finnish autumns and winters that everyone around here was making me believe in. Yeah, snow’s in, but it ain’t really cold yet, as it was colder in Ljubljana this past week than it was in Jyväskylä.

But that’s not the point. The point is that the snow came in at the right time for us to role in it in between saunas. And if there’s anyone who hasn’t done it and wonders what’s it like: it’s fuckin’ great. Having experienced that, I seriously can’t wait for an avanto session (avanto = drilling a hole in the frozen lake and dipping in the water). But even rolling in the snow wasn’t the only novelty for me; the other one being savusauna or smoke sauna.

Savusauna almost always a building in itself, or a small log house, if you like. What makes savusauna a savusauna is that the building doesn’t have a chimney, thus the stove which heats up the stones releases all the smoke, and of course soot within the building. The result of which is that the interior of the building is completely charred. Yep, touch a wall and you’re black. Cool. One of the differences I’ve found between the usual and most common electric sauna and the savusauna is that the heated air in the savusauna is much softer. And this savusauna was built by Hannu’s father and grandfather who made the stove.

I have to say that the whole sauna culture is quite interesting. Over the past three months I’ve been diligently gathering all kinds of information regarding the Finnish sauna culture. Hope I find time to write it all down as a one cohesive piece which I could share with all of you.

I’ve spent the weekend at Hannu’s parents’ place in Haarajoki (a 45 minute drive north of Helsinki) where Hannu threw a party for a dozen friends. The place is practically in the country side surrounded by forests. But before we came to Hannu’s Hannu, Olli and Mirja actually made it all the way to Jyväskylä and visited for two nights. Although they might have had fun, I think that they’ve seen pretty much all there’s to see in Jyväskylä in these two days. So, yeah, this was definitely a fun extended weekend.

I’ll be posting some pictures from these last several days sometime soon, but now I’ll run to sauna for a short while before I leave Haarajoki for Helsinki where I have to catch the evening train to Jyväskylä.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 27th, 2005 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Culture, Finland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.