Since I don't have a picture of the sauna, here's my first attempt at pancakes. They taste alright, but they aren't supposed to bubble like that!
Last Saturday, Jen, Heather, Elizabeth and I went on an adventure to a public sauna in Helsinki. We went to one of the last public wood-burning saunas in the city. It is popular now in Helsinki to have your own private sauna in your own home. There used to be a ton of public saunas but now there are very few. Apartment blocks also used to be built with a common sauna in the courtyard for residents to use, but now they are more commonly built with a sauna in each apartment. Our palace of an apartment has a nice communal sauna in the courtyard. We have an hour of sauna time every Thursday night followed by my (most often failed) attempts at making Finnish style-pancakes. This makes Thursdays great days.
Our adventure at the sauna was supposed to follow cross country skiing. Actually, Heather and I were going to go downhill skiing but we decided to it was too much money for not enough time. So we opted to go cross country skiing instead. When Saturday rolled around, it was about +5 Celsius outside and that plan was nixed as well. Instead we went to school, worked for a healthy 2-3 hours then made our way to the sauna. Kotiharjun Sauna is in a neighborhood called Kallio, where we really haven’t been much so we naturally got lost a few times. We finally found it, paid 7.50 Euro (student discount!) and went upstairs. We were greeted with a loud, boisterous dressing room of Finnish women. They were drinking champagne and cider, drying their hair, putting on make up and running around in bras and nylons. We found lockers and made our way through the shower room into the sauna room. This room was HOT. All saunas are hot, that is their obvious purpose, but this was the first time we visited a wood-burning sauna and the heat is something entirely different. The air is incredibly hot in wood-burning saunas so it is almost difficult to breath. In electric saunas, it is as if it gets more humid when water is thrown on the stove. It is tricky to explain. We started on the top bench (where it is hottest) in the first sauna round, but ended a few benches down after that. The most important thing to note is that women of all shapes and sizes use the sauna. Seriously, there was even a pregnant woman. One older woman sat on the top bench the whole time and then poured a whole bucket of water all over her. Overall it was quite an experience and I’m sure we’ll go back. We’ll just have to remember two towels, water and beer (called Sauna Olut in these occasions).
It’s also best to follow sauna trips with a visit to Kolme Kruunua for incredible meatballs.
http://www.kotiharjunsauna.fi/
http://www.kolmekruunua.fi/
-mls
