The Finnish-Style Home Sauna Ritual
Savitaipale, February 15th, 2018.
Today’s morning was quite calm and passed quickly. This week, I started working every day at 10:00, so I haven’t had to wake up too early. I know I haven’t talked much about my volunteer work lately, but it’s mostly the same tasks every day. However, there was a new one today that caught my attention… removing fuzz from wool garments. Or, in other words, “shaving” the clothes.
How to “Shave” Clothes
Fuzzballs accumulate on wool garments like sweaters, socks, hats, or even dolls made from this material. They are removed with a device like this, leaving the clothes perfect and soft. When the box of clothes to repair arrived, I didn’t expect such a big difference between the before and after. The best part about doing this is that it’s super therapeutic, and you can spend hours doing it. In fact, the lady from the WorkAway told me it was her favorite task, but due to lack of time, she couldn’t do it.
Easter is coming
On another note, with Easter approaching, we’ve cleared a couple of shelves and started placing Easter-related items for sale. For example, Easter eggs, little chick figurines, stickers, napkins with special decorations, and so on. As more items arrive, we’ll continue adding them to the Flea Market.
The Sauna Ritual
After the workday, it was time to relax in the sauna. Originally, we were going to Savitaipale’s public sauna on Wednesday, but after getting tired from our Lappeenranta day trip, we canceled the plan. However, to not miss out on it, we decided to move it to today, but at home. After dinner, we started the sauna and began the ritual.
The first times that I was in a sauna, I did it more intuitively. For example, I stayed for a few minutes (very few), went out to take a shower, and then went back in. This time, I wanted to be more persistent, so I decided to follow a routine suggested by one of my teammates. It consisted of 20-25 minutes in the sauna, 5 minutes outside, then another 20 minutes in the sauna, and so on.
We took a quick shower and went into the sauna. It felt quite nice inside, but every time we poured water to increase the heat, you could feel the heat and how sweat dripped down. Personally, the first few minutes are bearable, but after a while, it starts to feel overwhelming.
Cooling Down from the sauna at -10ºC
After the first 20 minutes, it was time to step outside. By outside, I mean stepping outside the house, where the temperature was about -10/-12ºC. As I mentioned when I talked about the Finnish sauna experience, I still find it incredible to be in such low temperatures and not feel cold. Your body has absorbed so much heat that it can handle the low temperatures perfectly. That said, I put on slippers this time since I didn’t want to end up with frozen feet. Lesson learned!
When you step outside after being in the sauna, your body feels like a radiator. I could see my skin radiating heat, as it was visibly emanating from my body, in addition to the steam coming from my mouth when I spoke or breathed. Although it felt fine at first, after a few minutes, I started to feel the cold again. So, after the required 5 minutes, we went back to the sauna.
In the second round, I lasted less, around 10 minutes. This time, I went out alone just to cool down and then went back into the sauna before finally leaving for good. Next time, I hope to stick to the routine or, even better… go back to the public sauna and swim in the lake again!
Northern Lights… Yes or No?
After showering and returning home to rest, I checked the Northern Lights forecast. I had been keeping an eye on it for the past few days, and it appeared that on the morning of the 15th and the early hours of the 16th, we would be at a 5(G1) on the KP index. This meant that we could potentially see the Northern Lights from southern Finland. Unfortunately, we weren’t that lucky. Despite the forecast, the KP didn’t go above 3.33. Additionally, it was so cloudy that it was impossible to see the stars.
We waited for quite a while to see if the KP index would rise, but we didn’t have any luck. In the end, we gave up and went to sleep since it didn’t seem worth waiting any longer… or so we thought. Anyway, we’ll keep checking to see if it rises again to 5 in the coming days!
