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
