Smoked Salmons

Tampere, Finland - The Finnish are famous for their love of the sauna. Nearly all homes are outfitted with one, and I'm told it is often the first thing built when a new house is erected. A modern Finnish sauna is similar to what you might find in your local gym: nice wooden benches and an electric stove to heat the room. For the real connoisseur, the traditional smoke sauna is preferred, though. So, it was real treat to get for me to be able to enjoy this cultural phenomenon while in Finland. As its name suggests, the smoke sauna is heated by a wood stove. The smoke sauna does not have a chimney, so the smoke literally fills the sauna and coats the entire room like the inside of a fireplace. The stove is used to superheat a pile of rocks and when the rocks reach a sufficiently hot temperature, the smoke is ventilated out and the sauna is ready for use. The sauna is enjoyed in the nude (men and women use them together at times and they are not thought of as a sexual place). Water is thrown on the rocks to create steam and the sauna may reach 80 degrees Celsius, which is just short of the boiling point of water. It's no wonder then that the sauna-goers are jokingly referred to as "smoked salmons." After sweating in the heat for a while, we trotted down to a nearby lake for an invigorating dip in the water. In our case, since it was winter, ice coated the lake and had to be broken before we could jump in. Quite obviously, we didn't spend any time swimming laps. Rather, we just jumped out and ran back to the sauna to get warm