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.

Sauna #3: Arla

Sauna Arla's website completely defied deciphering; google translation spat it back out, and anyway there didn't appear to be much actual website. All the pertinent details hide out in the logo block, and otherwise I only got that they seem to be hosting a lecture series. I'd heard a rumor it was a sauna/art gallery, sounded like a hip place. Something about murals on the walls...

The entrance gate is an impressive bit of welding, and the tunnel leading from the street into the courtyard tightropes between folksy kitsch and angular impressionism. I admit, the walk in got me hoping for tattoos and day-glo sauna hats. There are mysig lights beside the door, and it looked like the courtyard serves as a cooling patio. The attendant's booth is hung with Sauna Arla logo t-shirts, bedazzled AC/DC flipflops and framed magazine pages. There's a little basket of cherry tomatoes on the counter, and carafes of water topped with new glasses like an outdoor cafe. The changing room is painted bright colors, and there are a ton of excellent art-scene magazines in the very sparse cooling-area. So maybe Arla is arty, but its no gallery.

On my own again (I guess the place is full on weekends, but not in the post-dinner hours of Thursday evenings), the attendant showed me around, making sure – “since it is your first time at Arla” – that I knew how to steam the stove “safely.” Not properly. Safely. You see, the stove at Arla is the size of a phone booth. It's electric, but electric like the power plants of your favorite 1930s monochrome industry-and-man photo. Through a hatch exactly at head height, dark stones smolder and mutter.

The whole room was colorless tile and concrete. The stove dominated a full sixth of the space. The heat dominated everything. The kind of heat that wants you to submit to it, and is very confident. Heat filled every corner, every crack. Walls and floor and stairs and stove were locked in a thermal feedback loop. The benching on the top stair was hot to the touch. (Its hard to make wood hot to the touch.) Standing on anything put my feet in danger of blistering. Leaning against anything was a Very Bad Idea. I made myself comfortable with extra sauna “pillows” (little lengths of benching meant to lean against, or sit upon if you're making use of one of the lower stairs); one at my back, one under my feet. From this refuge, I set about my sauna in a safe (and awed) manner.

You steam the sauna at Arla like you're practicing boxing, it's all timing and accuracy. The ducking and retreating are also like combat training. You nimble your way down to the floor, scoop up a good-sized ladle of water, take careful aim, and heave it into the maw of the stove. Then you best duck, drop the ladle back in the bucket, and scurry like an edible thing back up to your seat. With this technique you are almost certainly guaranteed to 1) minimize time toasting your tootsies on horizontal surfaces, 2) show proper respectful genuflection to the fire-monster in the room, and 3) avoid scalding your face with water vaporizing at velocity.

And if you do, you are then rewarded with the most astonishing, embracing, muscular steam a sauna-lover could hope for. It rolls towards you in bellows, digging its fingers into shoulders and neck, reaching around to prod your back muscles. And you relax, all at once, thoroughly surrendered to the Great Beast Healing. “Lovely” is too pastel a word for this steam, “impressive” is too clean-edged, “overwhelming” too violent. What's wanted is a word for a particularly elegant excavator, or some prehistorically large animal galloping. “Majestic” works, so does “behemothic.” I imagine the wrathful compassion of daikinis would be similar.

About an hour into this ritual, I finally realized the addictive quality of sauna as an endurance sport. In between the thrilling steam drill, I sat on the top stair being massaged by the steam-mastadon, and sweating. I did so for as long as seemed reasonable, then went out for quick cold showers. My usual sauna cues seemed not to manifest; I felt no giddiness, no palpitations, no woozyness, no ineffable feeling of resolution. I did feel as if I was being completely wrung out, but as this is not one of my personal sauna-sensations, I felt more curious about What Would Happen Next than anything. I kept going back for mastadon. I tapped into the sauna archetype known as the Heroic Sufferer. I fidgeted, and tried out different positions. I spent a lot of time trying to decipher the thermometer. It seemed stuck, patinaed to the point of permanence, topped out at 140. But that didn't seem right, since I wasn't, y'know, dead. (I expect the needle should have been hovering between 90-100 – Mr. Attendant agreed.)

Eventually, and all at once, I knew I Was Done. My scamper had been massaged into a wobble, and I thought it best to just keep my head down and bow my way past the stove and out the door. The shower couldn't get cold enough to calm the fire now living inside my skin. I felt like I had been given some kind of Monster Fire Transfusion, and I was positive I would never be cold again. But neither was I in any state to put street clothes back on. So I spent a completely, serenely limp half an hour catching up on the Helsinki art scene, and called it a night.

Sauna Arla Bastu: "Washes All"

Sauna #2: Hermanni

I almost missed it, hawk-eyed though I was, perched in the #6 tram. Hämeentie Street plays cute little games with it's address numbers – the left and right sides don't keep pace, and are happy to skip a decade or 2 on a whim. I'd almost begun thinking I'd gone too far, when I saw a little sign, shining through the rainy gloom, from the corner of a large apartment block.

Ducking around back I found that magical door named Sauna, and headed down to the basement level, and a hallway that would have been at home in any midcentury school building. A smiling lady in a marquee-booth between women's and men's doors later, I was in the locker room and on my own for the next 2 hours. (Being alone, I took the liberty of taking pictures, which I somehow always feel hesitant about in bathhouses.)

Hermanni Sauna is what I imagine any neighborhood bath could be like; comfortable and straightforward, not leaning in any particular direction. A clean, well-used, commonly-loved bath. The showering room is only for showering, the drying and dressing room for exactly what it says. Not much room for socializing or luxuriating, high function-to-form ratio.

The stove room is similarly simple, wood panels and wood benches, a lovely room long enough to feel a real heat differential from door-end to stove-end. The first public place here I've seen where the low bench could really be for sitting, maybe a nod to a multigenerational (multitemperational?) clientele. The stove is a monsterous thing; a cylinder of stones a solid 4 feet tall, caged by steel mesh. Through the gaps I could see long loops of heating element glowing orange. For all that it seemed a fairly timid stove, giving mild and even heat. Id guess somewhere between 70-80? (There was just a thermometer-shaped clean patch on the wall.) Throwing a ladle of water on it (really nice round-belly ladles!) didn't have a strong effect. The stove always stopped sizzling before any wave of heat rolled toward me, and the wave was short-lived. Smelled of hot metal and rainy asphalt. The heat was easy to spend long minutes in, easy to leave and return to, easy to tell when I was finished.

Sauna Hermanni -- Neighborhood bathhouse.

Sauna #1: Kotiharjun

“Smells Like Home” Sauna

As I walked up, men young and old were cooling themselves in towels under the huge red neon SAUNA sign, along the sidewalk to the front door. The neighborhood reminded me of any urban apartment district, a bright-lit restaurant-and-laundry street just around the corner.

The tiny foyer was high traffic, cramped with a deep freeze for birch whisks, a cooler for hard & soft drinks, brightly colored piles of towels, and photocopied instructions on the walls. The attendant stood in a tiny closet of an office with a half-door and a vibe like a maitre d'. One door, propped open, looked down a few steps into the men's changing/cooling room, wooden lockers and tables and dozens of body types roaming pinkly around. The air in the foyer smelled strongly of layers of sweat, and clean laundry.

Up the stairs out of the miasma and through frosted glass doors, the women's changing/cooling room looked similar, though less thoroughly used. The odd fake plant, wood lockers and varnished benches and picnic tables. The air smelled lightly like a half dozen kinds of soap, and delicious roasting sausages from a friendly gathering in progress.

Unrobed and farther in, the large shower room had nubby pebbled flooring and excellent showers, the kinds here with both mobile and static shower heads, and a toggle to switch between. Plenty of hooks to leave my towel, cement benches on which to commandeer a few square inches to stash my shower supplies, if I'd had any. (Note to self: bring shower supplies.)

At the far end of the shower room is a wooden-handled wooden door named Sauna. The stove room is cement, filled with piles of cleanly split wood, and walking in, it is simply warm. On the left is a giant, impressive (incinerator-, crematorium-worthy) furnace of a stove. There are stern warnings not to mess with this oven in 3 languages (the English one calls it the Owen.) Past the stove is a kind of amphitheater of cement stairs rounding 2 walls, the top level about 4 feet from the ceiling and decked with narrow pine planks. 2-foot lengths of similar benching are propped up for backrests.

On the top stair the room smelled of wood smoke, hot pine and clean steam. Standing on the middle stairs I caught the mammalian scent of warm bodies – it actually was very homey. Stepping off the stairs each time I left the sauna for a quick cold shower, I could smell chlorine, and the metal of the stove, but these scents slunk around the floor.

The heat built with each step up, at first I was surprised that only the top stair was decked for a bench, but it's only at the top that the air is finally hot enough to draw sweat. The wall behind me radiated heat, I was held on all sides by heat. The thermometer on the wall behind me kept its needle hovering around 90. Each time a woman entered or left the stove room, she would ask if we wanted more steam. She'd open a little lever on the stove for a second or two, and hissing billows would roll towards us. As it wrapped around us, the air got quiet and heavy, and everything seemed to go into soft focus. Soft and round, it was still the kind of steam that bows your head for you. My lungs felt bigger with every breath, my muscles longer and my skin smoother. Each time I left the room, I cranked the showers colder. By the end of 2 hours of bowing to heat and ducking under cold water, sitting on the top stair felt like floating.

Kotiharjun Sauna -- Helsinki's oldest wood-fired public sauna.

A Prelude To All This Bathing

I love bathing. Soaking. Sweating. Steaming. I love bathing of all sorts. I love giant claw-foot cast iron tubs. I love dinner-plate cascade showerheads. I love wooden rooms with black stoves breathing the scalding perfume of forests. I love pale smooth tiled rooms veiled in curls of warm mist.

I love camping solar showers and watertank farm showers and jumping in rivers. I love exfoliating with beach sand and painting myself with mud. I love homemade salt scrubs and candlelit tubs and chromotherapy and fragrant, herb-infused water. And yes, if it's all I've got, I also love rickety prefab shower cabinets and thumpy fiberglass tubs.

And I love bathhouses. All-wood and tatami, onsen-inspired ones. Romanesque marble-and-echo ones. Mosaic bellystone ones. YMCA gymnasium ones. Hippies-on-the-beach ones. Forest retreat picture-window ones. Strip-mall imported-salt-chunk-and-plastic-seahorse ones. Sanitarium scrub-down ones. I am radically pro-bathhouse. I want more in the world.

I want you to know this, so you know where I'm coming from, when I talk about what I've been doing. I read through guidebooks and travel forums, and people are reviewing bathhouses like the opening of a new fast-food chain. I've been to bathhouses that weren't my style, and bathhouses that didn't function, but I don't believe in bad bathhouses. I'm not looking for perfect. I'm not looking for fancy. I'm not even looking for effortless. I don't mind a bathhouse that takes me an hour to find, that's older than I am, whose traditions I have to learn, whose cleaning crews aren't compulsive. I've got reams of theories about bathing and enjoying life, about health and happiness and the right to both. I want bathhouses that make people happy. I'm looking for living, vital bathhouses that are loved by their patrons, cared for by their owners, and are improving people's lives. I believe in bathhouses that work. I believe in lots and lots of bathing experiences.

And the bathing experience we're discussing right now is saunas. Because this is Scandinavia, full-on Finland, where they made up the word Sauna. So, our language is sweat and stove and stone and wood and fire and steam. For the rest of the chapter, we are all sizzle and bench and endorphin rushes and this beautiful idea of löyly (which is a word I can't pronounce, and neither can you, but I like to read it, and to hear Finnish people describe it as near-sentient steam, the soul of the sauna.)

Oh, and a word about temperature. I'm using Celsius as my sauna-heat measure, because it underscores for me the whole complete and unique tactile environment in the stove room. (I can't hear “110 degrees Fahrenheit” without thinking of that vacation in Texas, or my childhood summer egg-experiments. Too prone to hyperbole. Even (hitherto) imaginary temperatures like 180.) Celsius gives sauna heat it's own authority. So, let's just remember that 100 degrees boils water, yes? And 40 is a dangerously hot summer day.

All Kinds Of Ready!

I have a mission today! A bright, golden glowing mission that will, can only, result in lovely sighs and victory! I've got a fancy new wooly hat, and a scratchy new mitt, and you know what that means? Today I sauna!

Sauna Aitta -- Helsinki's only all-sauna, all-the-time accoutrement store!

I'm On A Boat!

I have slept in some truly sketchy places in my life (dubiously stained motel rooms with recently kicked-in door jams, mosquito-net-for-walls huts 100 yards uphill from alligator mating grounds) but last night's bunk may be the most conceptually frightening so far. I slept on the ferry to Helsinki, across the Bothnian Bay. I slept in cabin 2023, on level 2. That's at the bottom of the ferry, just above the deep-freeze food storage. So it's below the 5 people decks crammed with captains and cabins and casinos and karaoke bars and cafes. And it's right below the automobile deck, because this is a big ferry. In fact, now that I think of it, it's probably below the waterline.

The cabin was tiny, barely big enough to see carpet when the bunks folded down. There's no windows on that level, just a cute porthole-shaped photo of a lighthouse taken somewhere made of equal parts perfect fluffy clouds and minnow-calm water. But it was scrupulously clean, and had its own bathroom and hot shower. Which is saying something, given that there are only about 6 public restrooms for all the public areas of the ferry.

I'd recommend it to anyone! It's like a snug little womb room, where nothing but sleep lives. The weird rocking and rumbling of engines pulling weight over waves is kinesthetic white noise. If you've ever enjoyed falling asleep in the backseat of a car, summer evening wrapped all around you; you'll love it. Yellowing plastic light switches glow like distant dashboard lights, and the hiss of air conditioning is like radio static, the warm air barely moving. Every mutter of of foreign language passing by in the halls is like the murmur of adults in the front seats, driving home from a day in the sun. I haven't slept so well in weeks.

[My favorite Swedish word right now is Ochså, Also. (Say it oak-so, with the first syllable in the back of your throat.)  Och (said with so slight a k-sound that it's almost oh -- no Engineering Officer impressions, please) is And; I love the relationship!]

Learning to Fisk

Today ended much as it began; with herring. Ended with my first personal flirtation with preparing the fresh fish – a strong-smelling but delightful tryst, deliciously endowed with liberal amounts of hot butter and garlic. Began more timidly – those of you who like adventure food will agree – with a twist in flavor on the much-loved pickled fish. (There are no less than 5 flavors of pickled herring at the bodega-grocery the train station; at the full-scale one in the middle of town, I stopped counting at 8. The jars further down the shelf had begun to include mussels, shrimps and other sea-bits, and I could no longer in good conscience categorize them as herrings.) Though mustard, and lemon, look like nice flavorscapes to accompany the fish, I started my Swedish pickled herring perusal with dill. Dill is ubiquitous here, tucked into all kinds of sauces and salady things and herb mixes. (I'd even be willing to insist I've seen sprigs in some floral arrangements, if you need a good anecdote.) In fact, if you're going to have a seasoned foodstuff here, I've been assured it would be safe to bet it will be seasoned with dill. Or the occasional juniper berry.

Much of the spice-box I suspended between wooly pants and wooly sweaters on the flight over was designed to outweigh this whole dill-obsession. Heavy on the dried peppers (ancho, chipotle, cayenne and aleppo), but also on a couple of mixes that simply cannot be easily swayed to the Forces of Sweet. Because dill most certainly can. Yep, sweet pickled herring is what I ate this morning, and as much as I enjoy pickled herring –and flaunting the sweet-breakfast convention in general – it was kind of weird.

In between herrings, then, was a super mundane day of travel-city-logistics: learning how the public transportation card is filled with money (equaling more rides), acquiring a Hosteling International membership (equaling more beds), and finding an easy-to-read and cheap wrist watch (equaling, counterintuitively, a little less free time). The sum total of the day: increased fish quotient in my belly, and Increased Preparedness for Traveling.

Tomorrow, its back to oogling the magic of narrow, colorful cities pushing their ways up through the rocky floors mossy forests – we're going to Uppsala (say it Oop-sala)!

The word of the day is Herring: Sill (seel). And sillar (seel-ahr, that's more than one herring) are a kind of fisk. 

This Couch is Mysig

I honestly cannot recommend an east-to-west, 7-timezone airplane ride to anyone, but 32 hours after the fact, I'm doing pretty well. The first 10 hours were tricky, jetlag has gotten more sophisticated since I last tasted it. I kept getting second winds, feeling fine, looking forward to life, and starting out on adventures. Invariably, I got halfway (just inside the grocery door, to the apex of a loop around the neighborhood, up off the couch for a glass of water) suddenly was quite convinced someone was slowly but confidently pulling the linoleum/asphalt/ubiquitous birch floor paneling out from under my feet. Loss of balance was quickly ganged up upon by the sensation of being pressed by about 60 pounds of wet sand. I felt cold, and flush, and very very stupid. I'd persevere in a half-conscious sort of way, accomplish X goal without any feeling of victory, and slump back gratefully in stasis … only to get another second wind 15 minutes later. I made it til 9 before I lost consciousness and feel very very lucky that I could still say words by then.

Today, though, waking up was easy, and besides a total lack of attention span, I feel happy and normal. We walked through Stockholm, mostly the oldest island Gamal Stan, where the streets are two-wingspans wide, orthotically cobblestoned, and decorated with many antique and tasteful-tourist shops. It was a look-but-don't-touch day, a get-lost-on-purpose day, a oh-my-there's-skulls-under-that-dragon-statue day. I could hardly see the architecture for the bricks, and look forward to visiting again when peering into every window isn't so all my brain will allow. There's a gaming store (a big one with fantasy novels, comics and all kinds of geekphenalia) in which I'd love to spend an afternoon. It has a shingle hanging above the door with a painting of a dragon fighting a rocketship. Yay!

The city didn't smell like much besides cold, wet stone and the occasional municipal construction site. The buses smell like Sharpies. But outside boutiques and flower shops, on the little stone sidewalks in front of bakeries and offices, little fires were burning. Some were tea lights in colored glass jars, some were tiny campfires in little iron cages, all merry and flickering. These are mysig (say it mee-sig, with your tongue against your front teeth, the cuter you slur the better, and its an adjective), a sweet little assurance that the place within is Cozy. Friendly, nice, snug, sitting-with-friends-by-the-fire-with-a-mug-of-glogg cozy. Sweden is just about the cutest.

Now it is dark (has been since 4), just above freezing, and we've finished a dinner of corn chips (a brittle, super-finely-ground-corn local brand), home-refried black beans (they came canned in a box!) and fresh salsa made as spicy hot as we could handle. Somewhere winding through the neighborhood I can hear the chiming of an ice-cream truck.

My vocabulary is growing, mostly thanks to Engelsk Bildordbok (a Swedish-to-English dictionary done completely in pictures – nouns are awesome!):

Svamp is your singular Mushroom (more than one would be svampar)

Ren is Reindeer

Dogs say “Bow!”

And the word for Uterus is Livmoder

Two Days To Go!

My bags are packed and my storage unit is full! I've done all the adult things I could think of to transform myself from a stationary community member into a mobile citizen. In the last weeks I've hugged just about everyone I know in town, and walked through all my haunts. 3 months is almost no time at all, but somehow this time I feel  the stretch of miles. All my brittle nerves settled into a smooth rising crescendo of excitement at the beginning of the week, and I've found myself easily falling into that panoramic soft-field-of-vision where I see with my heart as much as my eyes.

With the promise of "Only salt and pepper, maybe dill," as my seasoning landscape ahead, I am soaking in as many flavors as possible to keep my tongue warm for the winter. In preparation, I've kept up a brisk schedule of revisiting every single spicy favorite food and restaurant I love here. Because, really, thats a seasoning promise? Threat. Challenge! I'm travelling with a box of spices that takes up a 6th of my suitcase, and I am fully prepared to wrestle any Swedish ingredient into deliciosity!

The PLAN

In a couple of weeks, I'll take rides on a couple of airplanes, and jump a couple of hours into the east. I'll set foot in Scandinavia, Mother of Winter, and a renewed desire for the perfect bath. I will spend a couple/few months travelling, bathing, living across European winterlands, and will return much rejuved!
I have nursed a dream for many years of creating a place for wellbeing and hot water for the place in which I live, the kind of neighborhood haven we could all use when the days get cold and the nights get long. I think there is a whole world of good to be had in a soak, a sweat, a nice long bath. The kind of good that can chase the winter blues away. I love public baths, and I'm excited to see what public bath culture looks like in Europe.
Soon coming, regularly-updated epic adventures, impressive pictures, tales of daring-do, and a great many bathtubs!

Some Other Things I Know For Sure

1. Madison is my home. It's where I come from and where I come back to. It's where I want to work and play, and cook and love and make and talk and dance and perform.
2. But it's not where I dream. Every corner of this city is six layers deep in memory for me, all this comfy cotton batting of the past to climb though before I can see anything new.
3. So, every so often, I need to leave, so I can dream new things, and shine up my eyes. Then I need to come back and make those dreams real.
4. This is very much fun for me!