Wasa: We're Doing It Wrong!

My friends, I've made a discovery. I have realized the errors of my ways and am humbled before Foodstuffs. It was an honest mistake, though possibly shameful that I have persisted in it for 3 decades. I was misguided, or perhaps unguided.. Left to my own devices in pantries and grocery coop aisles, I admit, I thought they were simply Bad Crackers.

Crackers the culinary equivalent of particleboard; too fibrous for fun, too dry to be interesting, and always (I thought) subtly threatening to leave splinters in my soft palate. Overpowering in their sheer granular density to all but the sharpest of cheddars, insufferably hard even with soup, and requiring way, way too much chewing . No matter which flavor I tried – from the burnt sienna rye to that weird wafer stuff, the multigrain rainbow in between – I just couldn't like them. Maybe, if you were “raised by hippies,” like I was (that's not a slight, Mom & Dad, it's just a cultural signifier – you were feeding us tofu and dressing us in veleur for too long to deny it, and I love you for it), or if you've ever (like me) grocery shopped with only change in your pockets, or (like me) have more sense of adventure than good sense, you've had similar collisions with Wasa. And lived with the regret.

But friends, as I stand before you today (sit on a hostel bed typing from several thousand miles away), I can assure you; We Just Got It All Wrong. Wasa isn't the enemy. We weren't even making bad choices, we just weren't operating the cracker correctly! I have seen the true and benevolent face of Wasa, and I can share with you the secret: They're For Breakfast!

Listen, this changes everything. Wasa is quite possibly the road to morning-eating success for anyone (like me) who simply cannot deal with waking up to clingy, doughy, sweet food. Wasa is a clean, near-neutral canvas upon which to paint your most delicious breakfast dreams (near-neutrality is key, there's truly no point in eating beige). Particularly well-suited to the savory breakfast (as all reasonable and benevolent foodstuffs ought to be), Wasa's deep grain flavors provide the kinds of bass notes often missing in early-morning meals. These are the foundation for fantasy open-faced sandwiches, for breakfast! They are made Hard On Purpose, so they can be piled high with any/all your favorite cheeses/meats/vegetables/dairy-based semi-solids, becoming a veritable Edible Plate. (Which is good, because for those of us with morning-impaired manual dexterity, forks and knives are an unnecessary danger.) (Also, seriously, Pile Up. One swipe of cream cheese means nothing to Wasa. These things can still taste like performance-art food if you don't show some ambition.) They are made Indefatigably Crunchy a) so even if you do apply a solid inch of semi-solid dairy-things, you still get to chew something and b) because contrasting food texture is neat. Texture wakes up your mouth. And those splinters, they aren't endangering your gums, they're optimizing your dental hygiene routine like the little cleaner-fish that hang out in the mouths of resting sharks.

Breakfast revolution and shark similes. Let the healing begin!

Some Baths That Aren't Yet

Most of the baths I've visited have had historic precident, gracing their cities as original facilities if they were not actual founding reasons for putting a bit of civilization a particular where. When new baths come along, they are made from equal parts inspiration and obsession. Some borrow from history and culture, some forge ahead, but all are intentionally reinvesting in bathing.

Berlin's once-and-future Stadtbad Oderberger  thrives during renovation as a venue for concerts, conferences and locally-made craft markets.

Kultuurisauna is being built as part of Helsinki's year of recognition as a World Design Capitol, with goals of sustainable design and materials-use, and intentional revitalization of sauna culture.

Some Baths That Aren't Anymore

Searching out venerable thermae, traditional neighbohood saunas, and the brand-new soaking spots, the word for Bath is the first I'm learning when I enter a new country. My eyes and ears are constantly casually scanning for signs of bathing. Probably I imagine baths more often than they exist (though honestly, what else is going on in a backyard shed with a chimney?), but I've been impressed that almost every Scandinavian town has a Sauna-something Street, and at how many Germanic placenames end with -Bad.

So there are many places I come across where I don't bathe, where nobody bathes anymore; but maybe there's a commemorative plaque, or an epithet in stone, or a bit of historical mention in a travel book.

The People's Bathhouse on Oderberger Strasse, in Berlin. A once-and-future-bathhouse, long neglected but being restored...

In Tallinn's Old Town there is still a Sauna St, and a historical stop in their self-guided walking tour.

One of the original spring sites in a cliff embedded in Baden-Baden.

Under the Friedrichsbad Bathing Temple in Baden-Baden is the ruins of a Roman soldier's bathhouse, locked safely away all winter long.

Land Is Land

One thing I've noticed, traveling around this planet of our as much as I've been able, is that everywhere I go, the landscape is home. Surely, different parts of the world wear different colors, and sometimes the shapes and scale are unique and surprising. There is always something new to see, around the corner, if you are curious enough. But the land is brown and green. The sky is blue and white. The sun shines yellow and pink. The stars and moon glow silvery against black and purple. Traveling through winter, the land faded to sketch and monochrome, every tree is shadow-brown, all small plants are in their quiet tan pajamas, and everything else is dusty white. I could be skirting Chicagoland, nearing the foothills of the Rockies, crossing upstate New York. But I am racing though Bavarian countryside, and this blizzard could have followed me from Stockholm, or it could be a stranger from Russia. I haven't done much traveling in the winter (some part of me has always been too skeptical to allow for possible frostbite on a lonely train station) until now. I love the spherical intimacy of it, the land in focus only nearby, the colors subtle. From a train, snug and speeding, the familiarity of the landscape has a special magic all its own.

It's only when we cross into the acreage of civilization that shapes begin to look Foreign. The different ways different people use hills, or roofs, or the edge of their claims. The little towns crowded into Black Forest valleys, vertical like a tapestry painted on silk, never minding perspective. Switchback roads and yellow faces and linear yards of crenelated edging, mirroring the pines above and causal river below. Steep tiled roofs in drainage undulation or dragon scale. Tight and idyllic, efficiently antiplanned, like a bird's nest.

And around the bigger cities, where we might have a Fitchburg or an Urban Sacrifice Zone, there are summer gardens. Little plots of land where urbanites, missing nature but unendowed with a summer home, can tend a bit of earth and fly a flag. Which I guess is another kind of sacrifice. The cute crowds of small fenced yards and sheds are always along railroad corridors, so I'm not sure what they garden. Summer memories. Even in winter, they look tidy and happy, some terraced and some wreathed in years of wisteria vines. Miniature national/natural dream colonies. Every bit of land is a door to all of Earth.

Thermae #1: Liquidrom

Liquidrom is a rare bathhouse; newly arrived but singing with quality, totally modern with a great deal of soul. It definitely caters to a contemporary crowd – multigenerational but skewed towards the professional – the folks you'd see at a swank club or an artsy cirques review. (That crown topping the building in the photo? That's the Tempodrom on the other side of the building, a swanky big venue.) Liquidrom is outfitted in concrete walls and raw slate floors, but it doesn't ever feel cold or Bloc. The stone lines are graceful, often curved, proportions generous. Iron-caged mysig candles and sculptural flora line the halls, on the walls hang the kind of modern pop art inspired by the circles that inspired mandala-makers. There's soft electronica piped through invisible speakers, vaguely new-age-holiday. Liquidrom knows what it's doing. Liquidrom wants to be cool, and it is cool.

The changing rooms are large and gym-like, if your neighborhood gym goes in for mahogany paneling and shiny black tile. Lockers are secured with a rather complicated key-chip-bracelet, and because this is Germany (home of the Free Body Culture dreaded by Scandinavians) the locker rooms are coed, the bathhouse is coed and largely clothing-discouraged, except for at the bar and in the big pool. Yeah, there's a bar, and a free glass of prosecco the night I visited, and nightly live music, which ranges from jazz to bossa nova to cinematic downbeat. In between sweating and soaking, there are generous resting rooms (indoor and out – where in December you can watch steam curl off your skin) filled with comfortable lounge chairs to cool off and sip whatever.

Lining the minimalist half-wall corridors are nearly a dozen different rooms in which to sweat or soak. 4 different saunas, each a different temperature (from 65 to 90), some featuring aromatic steams or walls of pink Himalayan salt. Each is labeled with bathing information and expectations (wash your seat in the steam room, in the saunas you must have a towel under your butt and feet, etc.) Besides the large pool, there are several soaking pools, each filled with salty thermal water. None reach jacuzzi-heat, but the outdoor pool is warm under the snowflakes, and one pool is so salinated your body floats effortlessly. In between these are cold plunges and huge-headed showers, and passing trays of cold fruit juice and warmed honey for self-massage carried by beautiful waitrons.

The largest pool in Liquidrom is a centerpiece of atmospheric modulation. The ceilings are domed in wide, loomingly post-deco arches; the kind of pool where city elite might swim, deep under Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The salty warm water glows with colored light, refraction patterns ripple over everything. The electronica is piped here too, echoing weirdly off so many curves, but is even more impressively heard Underwater, where the music hollows and billows like whalesong from submarine speakers. So after a hour perusing a plethora of little steams and sweats and soaks, after your senses are relaxed by the wandering of sensorial slowness in a realm of remarkably quiet architecture, imagine lying just covered with warm water somehow holding you afloat, while colored light wafts across your eyelids and shadowy rhythms nod in your ears. When the night's visiting 12-string guitar began picking its silvery way through the waves, my mind joined my muscles in relaxation and I drifted, balanced in a luminous place.

LIQUIDROM: Urban Bathing-Culture

Hammam #1: Hamam

In Berlin, I met my first modern bathhouses, places created intentionally for this generation, the daughters of those cultural edifices reaching out to us from Tradition. Intercultural lovestories and our modern access to everything actually can, I'm grateful to say, create spaces of beauty and healing. Berlin shines in my mind as a hopeful answer from many directions.

Hamam is a women's bathhouse, embedded in a larger women's community center, all of which is housed in what used to be a chocolate factory just to the east of the Wall. The neighborhood is lively and human-scale, though the architecture is made of bland Bloc blocks. As I walked from the train station, the temperature dropped by degrees, and powdery snow fell. Down a alley into a courtyard used in the warm months for sunning and sipping, Hamam already feels tucked away and special. I rang a blue doorbell and was welcomed into a jeweled oasis, and by far the sweetest bathhouse I have ever relaxed in.

It's beautiful inside, warm light, white plaster arches and the scent of honey and tea. A theme of couches and pillows begins in the welcome room and is repeated in every part of the hamam that isn't actively wet. The walls are studded with colored glass lamps, reproductions of romantic-era hamam paintings and photographs of modern hamams in action. In the upper lounge, there is a large bookshelf for browsing, and a counter with astringent tea and oranges to buy and massages to schedule. The changing room is a logistical afterthought, lockers in a curtained hallway. Everyone after is wrapped in huge fluffy towels, their own robes or pestemals (soft plaid fabric worn like a sarong, or Indian lungi.) Women carry their potions and tools in duffel bags or baskets. Carpeted stairs wind down to curtained glass doors and the baths.Within the hamam itself the air is warm and lights softer, and the ceiling hung with glowing fabrics. The couches, deep as twin beds, are upholstered in vinyl, piled with pillows, and every few feet supplied with throw blankets. Women sit and doze and read and chat softly, rosy from bathing and relaxed.

Past the resting room, narrow halls decorated with tile mosaic branch to massage rooms, sauna and cold shower, and the beating heart of the hamam: the bellystone room. Little bells of falling water ring off

the raw marble walls from the deep marble sinks set into alcoves. The air is dim and warm and carries light scents of lemon and rose. The domed ceiling holds a gold-flecked floral mosaic rosette in blues and greens, and round frosted skylights. The bellystone, an octagonal slab of polished marble and bigger than a king-sized bed, fills the space at knee-height. I lay my towel on the stone and lay myself on the towel, and warmth began pouring into my skin. The bellystone is not hot, but warm like an electric blanket, enough to prompt sweat but also enough to provoke absolute contentment. After a very few moments I was drifting, melted like butter.

Eventually, I wandered to an alcove, filled a sink with warm water, and used a silver bowl and soft cloth to douse and polish myself clean. I was visiting Hamam on “children's day” (it was also my birthday) and for the first time, I got to see what babies think of bathhouses. Giggling and splashing, shining pinkly after their bath, curled napping between reclining women on the bellystone, melted like little pats of butter. In no particular order, and with as much repetition as desired, the activities of the bellystone room seem to rotate around this dousing and dosing, and as the hours slip by, all bodies ease into a languid, liquid comfort. I did visit the sauna down the hall (small and wooden in classic Finnish homage, 80 degrees and filled with heavy lemongrass steam) but stayed only long enough to admire the efficient layout. The pace of the hamam was so contrary to extremes, I didn't miss sweating at all.

Hamam offers its tickets in 3-hour increments. I usually find I'm done with my bathing routines somewhere around 2 hours, and then I bounce or slide out of the bathhouse feeling rejuvenated and fresh. At Hamam, I spent a post-bath hour curled up on their magnificent couches, sipping tea and looking at the pictures in German magazines. During the extra time relaxing, the warmth and softness from the bellystone worked its way deeper under my skin, releasing tension and resolving my body into balance. When I finally left, snow was sticking, and it was colder still, but I was completely warm. I was warm for hours after.

Hamam: Bathing in the Chocolate Factory Women's Center

The Berlin Wall Is An Almost Perfect Synaesthetic Experience

It stands in front of you. It's so tall. And so thin. Hesitantly thin, stage-prop thin. You think, I could be the one to push it over, I could take this wall down with one good shove. Heat blooms in your chest, your cheeks, smelling of raw carrot. But it looms over you -- The Wall -- stormclouds with silvery barbed-wire lining, and even though it is fragile and swaying, it's nailbed is under your feet. It pulls you into its shadow with a roar nearly subsonic and tangy with rust. You think about it holding in decades, holding back hope, holding down the city in the unstretching tug of a long scar down your back.

The Wall swells before you, absorbing light and doubt. The dignity of the Wall rears over you, equal parts stubborn pride and clear glaring humility, dense as wool felt and welcoming. The Wall says, You have pushed me over hundreds of times, and I hope you will destroy me hundreds more times, everywhere you want to grow. And then it shows you how. The Wall fluffs out its feathers, a million billowing layers of gilt and angst, the million prayers and curses rubbed onto its surface. The color rises, fills your vision as a holy mountain, coats your tongue with opals and justice. Nettle infusion and the heat off birthday candles. A winged kitten, all downy fur and needle claws and wide skylight eyes, begins raging and playing in your chest. You know you will say no untrue thing the rest of the day. You know you are in the right place.

Still Assimilating, More Gracefully

I like Helsinki! Coming back to it after visiting Tallinn was a treat, feeling like I knew a place, like it was already mine. I had places I knew, a hostel I liked, more trust in the trains, favorite saunas to revisit. I could spend more time looking around, less time scabbling for balance. It was shinier.

The architecture in Helsinki is very self-confident, this lovely mash-up of all the different eras of the last century, those informed by royal sensabilities, civic pride, and the creative management of economic depression.

I saw my first Scandinavian sunset here. I learned a new transit system in a language I can't even begin to pronounce. And honestly, when it gives me chances to sauna twice a day, how could I not like this city?

Sauna #4: Kalma Saun

Kalma Saun even looks like the edifice from a different hybrid era it is. It's graceful, but monolithic; sheathed in marble and institutional tile and deep orange wood. Another unique tumble of the competing Slavic/Scandinavian/Rossiyan pachinko game like Estonia, like Finland. In all of Tallinn, it seems to be the only still-functioning, always-was-a bathhouse. Spas are everywhere, mostly tucked inside hotels and convention centers (which are also everywhere, outside Old Town), running a gamut of size and purpose. Some are salons with advanced manicure/pedicure offerings, others more like indoor water parks with swimming pools and waterslides, steam rooms and saunas.

If Kamla is their predecessor, I imagine I can understand the abundance. If we'd gone This is a more-is-more bathhouse, a bring-your-own full-service spa, a day-long ritual committed to complete restoration of personal purity. In the women's side (up the stairs to the left from the hotel-lobby-like attendant station), the atmosphere is relaxed and functional, the dress code is completely un-, and the complicit camaraderie between bathers is total. Women come in pairs or alone, and spend hours in ablution. They bring apothecaries of potted unguents and elaboratives, soaps and scrubs and masques and henna for their hair. They manicure and medic themselves, tend to exfoliation and eczema with equal focus, and perform every bit of body caring to be done. Kalma is, in fact, a large-capacity, well-resourced, bathing room. And it's wonderful!

The changing and resting room is outfitted like a den, there's a big fireplace that looks like it sees regular use when it gets truly cold, and overstuffed couches and chairs. The 13 wooden lockers are large and solid, ringing the lounge without a trace of privacy. This is where modesty ends. I was probably the youngest woman both times I visited, and was welcomed both times with a maternal lack of curiosity. Besides stashing away street-clothes so the bathers can attend to more important aspects of themselves, the lounge also acts for a comfy and dry cooling room, where you can sit in your new skin til you are ready to return to the world.

I visited twice because I love a fully-functioning and vibrant bathhouse, but also because I really wanted to get it right. In Helsinki's saunas, the meat of the visit is the stove room, the purging bouts of sweating, and a bracing scrub in cold water afterwards. At Kalma, its DIY spa day. The main activity swirls around a tiled room lined with showers and filled with stone benches that are equipt with hot and cold running faucets, like so many luxurious lab tables. Stationed at these, with buckets of water as hot as you like, with any tool and potion you desire, personal devotions begin. There is laughter and smalltalk, and susurations of comfort. The place smells like fresh-cut conifer wood, good green tea, and delicate soaps.

The sauna actual is a fierce place, where no one spends more than 5 minutes, and there was no question of me keeping up my (now solidly toned) usual sweating routine. The room is no more than 15 feet long, but baking with two electric stoves. The thermometer flexed between 100-110 degrees, and I believe every decimal. This is heat that stings you skin, and you don't adjust to it. The first time I sat on its wooden benches, my skin immediately prickled into goosebumps, and started itching. Still flush with pride in my sauna skills, I made it longer than the woman who came in with me, but only by seconds. Shocked and appalled moments later in as cold a shower as I could find, my skin cooled but remained a piebald of too-pink and distressingly-pale splotches. I scrubbed down until my skin was at least a uniform color, and spent much of my first stay in the lovely cool water pool.

So the second visit I came geared up. I brought my sauna kit (hat, sit-upon, sisal mitt), I brought a fragrant sliver of soap and my nail clippers, and I brought body oils. I also bought a whisk of leafy birch twigs from the attendant, because I'd been dreaming about them since reading about Traditional Sauna, and Kalma was the first place I'd seen anyone using them. I copied the other women, soaking my whisk in hot water til the twigs were soft and whippy, and the whole affair smelled like the woods in spring. After I was warmed up and had undergone my first layer of cleansing, I took the whisk into the stove room. I sat as long as I could, breathing the steam off the whisk while the heat pried open every one of my pores, and then set about slapping my skin. It was amazing! Suddenly, the prickly itch was met and overcome, and I swear I could feel endorphins flooding my body. As I finished whisking my back it was as if all my muscles, whether in affirmation or sensory overwhelm, all relaxed at once. Success! I stepped out of that dragon room, skin completely new, to finish my bath.  

Kalma Saun: Oldest bath in Tallinn

A Quick Digression

In the middle of my affair with Helsinki, a hostel roomate said, "You want to see a Real Living Bathhouse? You should go to Estonia!" So I spent the weekend in Tallinn, in the 1/2-mile square of Vanalinn (Old Town) a beautiful crumb of medieval cobbling holding down a port city. It overlooks the bay from a seat equal parts living stone and masonry, and every wall feels about 3 feet thick. I'm sure there are other parts of Tallinn which are lovely and interesting, I'm sure this city's public transportation system and everyday neighborhoods are full of adventure. But I feel such a vacation-like luxury here, I have no interest in them at all. All I want can be found wandering down tiny streets and craning my neck at stone reliefs. Tiny shops full of amber and pottery and the clouds of glowing wool creations. Museums venerable and contemporary, and art galleries by the acre.

One most excellent museums is the Nuku Museum of Puppet Arts: this is their "Steampunk Puppet Theater" -- a glowing window of clockwork automatons that whirl into jangly action every 30 minutes.

There's a funny thing happening to my field of vision, out here where I well and truly have no comprehension of the language. Automatic and endemic reader that I am, imagine my surprise now that the printed word has absolutely no meaning here. Advertising has turned into simple visual impact. Signage is visual noise. I might as well read dream newspapers. At first this was distracting, a little distressing, and I felt its loss. But now its like being sent home from work, with only a slight fever, and nothing to do the rest of the day. I've been freed from responsibility, in a bewildering way. Where did I put that ability to comprehend? I have become that smiling foreigner who simply has no clue. Strangers are lovely and helpful in need. Children think pantomime is hilarious. Shopkeepers are either kindly or exasperated. Bus drivers will let you get away with anything. I'm in a silent-film comedy.