Patrons enjoying a beer in the 55 C Zierbelstube sauna at the Munich area Therme Erding
Late September to early October means one thing to residents of Munich: The Oktoberfest, where nearly 6 million people consume more than 6.5 million liters of beer during the 15-day celebration. If you over-imbibed it the night before, or for people looking for a place to wash off the jet lag or just get away from the crowds, Munich offers a refuge: Its sauna baths.
Germany has thousands of public saunas, ranging from small add-ons to a hotel fitness room to bathing related theme parks. For the price of 1 to 3 Maß, you can spend the day lounging and sweating away your stresses or hangover. (There is some debate about the effectiveness of using a sauna as a hangover cure. I’ve always found it effective.)
Oktoberfest began in 1810 as a wedding party for a Bavarian Crown Prince. The party has been a good one, because it’s still going. It’s been celebrated for 177 of the last 200 years. It was originally celebrated in mid-October, but festival organizers have moved up the date to take advantage of the warmer weather in late September.
If you want to get started, here are the Munich area saunas from our database:
We know this has nothing to do with saunas, but its occupied much of our time for the last few weeks, and has caused a few days of downtime here. You may be experiencing similar problems, so we’d thought we’d share this.
This site is powered by WordPress. Since upgrading to the current version (3.0.1) we’ve had issues with memory. Specifically, we’ve been getting errors “Allowed memory size of 33554433 bytes exhausted.” We first started seeing them on the admin dashboard, then on some of the other admin pages, then on a few of the public pages. Then it took down the whole site one weekend.
Anyway, we’ve spent a lot of time digging through the WordPress support forums, enabling and disabling plugins, and generally banging our heads against the wall. We finally found it.
Here is our solution:
Upgrade WordPress and all your plugins to the current version first. Disable any you can’t live without. To get this site back online, we had to ftp in and delete a few non-critical plugins that were way out of date.
On the Memory Usage Overview that TPC puts at the bottom of your admin dashboard, look at the WP Memory Limit and the PHP Memory Limit. Both of these were set to “32M” on this site. Since version 2.8, WordPress really wants 64M. Memory usage was at more than 90% (WordPress wanted to use more, but couldn’t. This was the cause of the errors.)
To increase the WP Memory Limit, edit your wp-config.php file and search for a line like this and make sure the number before the last ‘M’ is 64 (or 128): define(’WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);
If you can’t find it, add it up near the other define statements towards the top of the file.
To increase your PHP Memory limit (you have to do both), you need to edit or add a php.ini file. On our host (PolurNet), we had to create it in the wp-admin directory. We tried other locations first, and it didn’t work. Ours has only this line: memory_limit = 64M
Where this php.ini file has to reside and if you can edit it varies from host to host. You’ll need to speak with your hosing company’s tech support for exact instructions.
Go back and re-install or re-enable your plugins. Watch to see if any of them are especially large memory hogs as you do so.
All right. Time to take off the propeller beanie and get back to the sauna.
After a promise made during a presentation at a recent Pecha Kucha night in Prague, one group of presenters, mjölk architekti, an architecture firm returned to their hometown of Liberec and built a sauna in the middle of the night on an abandoned concrete piling near a public beach.
A nearby cafe operates the sauna, selling firewood for the stove, and keeping the keys for the sauna and a small rowboat.
The architect’s say they built the sauna “to highlight the possibility of unlimited cultivation of public spaces and public life” and show that with an idea, passion for a good cause and some money, anything is possible.
The sauna was built without permits, and all planning was done in secret. The local government has not decided how to handle this yet.
Pecha Kucha Nights were devised by a group of designers in Tokyo as a network and sharing method for creative ideas. Each presenter shows a presentation made of 20 slides that advance automatically after 20 seconds.
The book is billed as a full-color history of Finnish sauna in the western Great Lakes. The publishers have released a trailer of the book on You Tube (embedded above) and promised two more installments later this fall.
According to the publisher:
As many in the north country can attest, one of life’s great pleasures resides in the tradition of sauna—sitting in 180-plus-degree heat and throwing cool water on oven-hot stones to create a blast of steam (called löyly), followed by a jump in the lake, standing naked in subzero temperatures (or even rolling in the snow), or just relaxing on the cooling porch. To the uninitiated, there is a strange, alluring mystique to the art of Finnish sauna. But to an ever-increasing number of people—from their small urban saunas to backwoods and lakeside retreats—the culture and practice of Finnish sauna are as much a part of northwoods life as campfires and canoe trips.
Beginning with the origins of Finnish sauna and arrival of the practice to North America, and continuing all the way to contemporary design, The Opposite of Cold is an exquisite commemoration of the history, culture, and practice of Finnish sauna in the north woods. With stunning photographs of unique and historic saunas of the region—including the oldest sauna in North America, incredible surviving saunas from immigrant farmsteads, and the gorgeous contemporary saunas from noted architects—Michael Nordskog and Aaron W. Hautala unveil the importance and beauty of sauna culture in modern Midwestern life.
Richly illuminated by Hautala’s photographs of distinctive saunas from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, and Finland, The Opposite of Cold is for people who grew up with Wednesday and Saturday evening saunas (or watched their steaming neighbors running toward the lake) and for those who dream of one day having their own. Through this book we see why Finnish sauna tradition is vital and enduring, from the warmest summer evenings to the coldest winter nights.
View the Airport from the Sauna at the Finnair VIA Spa
In December 2009, Finnair opened their Via Spa as part of their new lounge facilities at the Helsinki-Vantaa airport. The spa is unique, as it is the only publicly accessible sauna complex that is in the secure area of a major international airport terminal.
The new Via Spa area can welcome over 100 guests to its four different saunas and steam rooms, cold water treatment and mineral water baths, rest areas and wellness treatment rooms. Anyone over 18 can visit the Via Spa for a fee of 45 euros between the hours of 10 in the morning and ten at night. Finnair Plus Platinum cardholders have free access to Via Spa. You can even prepare yourself for your sauna experience with an ice spring before your take your shower. Berry-scented hair and skin care products are included in the basic price. The treatments on offer are being constantly being evolved and developed to be even more varied, according to the German Haslauer spa concept company that devises them. The cost of treatments varies from 31 euros upwards, and there’s a 50 per cent discount on general entry to the spa area for those customers wishing to take these treatments.
The Helsinki airport only serves a few long-haul routes. If you are looking for other places to sauna in an airport while you wait for your next flight, there is an extensive list out there. We are in the process of adding a new section to this site specifically for airport saunas.
Steam of Life, a documentary film that looks at several Finnish men baring first themselves in a sauna, then their souls to the camera, has been selected by Finland as their contender for the 2011 Foreign Language Academy Award.
The film, directed by Joonas Berghall and Mika Hotakainen that has been getting rave reviews on the film festival circuit, both for the frank reactions that their subjects give, and the beautiful cinematography. You can get a short glimpse of the film from its trailer (NSFW) on YouTube. At the moment, the film is available to save on Netflix.
For those of you seeking out a unique sauna experience, recently the New York Times profiled the resurgence of an old trend in Korea: Using a cooling charcoal kiln as a sauna.
To make charcoal in Korea, oak logs are placed into red clay caves, then heated for about a week to about 1400°C or 2550°F. The charcoal is ready to remove when the caves reach about 200°C or 390°F. That’s when the fun begins. The workers at the charcoal factory unload the kiln, sweep it out, and bring in rice straw mats. Guests pay KRW 11,000 (about US$ 9) for a cotton uniform (Korean co-ed saunas are used clothed, and synthetic clothing would melt in the heat) and the privilege of spending the day in the kiln.
According to the Koreans, charcoal is a purifying agent, and is commonly used in the construction of electrically heated urban saunas, including many here in the US. (Update: Lifehacker also weighs in on the purifying power of charcoal)
We tried to find the location of some of these saunas, but so far have come up blank. If you have experienced one, and can share details about it, let us know in the comments.
What makes for beauty in women? How do we as a society perceive women as they age? I began with what were simple intentions. I wanted to photograph without sentiment or objectification women daring enough to stand, without embarrassment or excuse, before my camera and I wanted my photographs to be beautiful. . . . I drew upon classical gestures and poses of Baroque and Neoclassical painters and utilized the platinum printing process to assure a sense of timelessness, as if the older or ‘normal’ woman has always been a subject of the arts.
- Jeanette Williams
Williams is a professor of photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. For more background, you can read the review of the book in the New Yorker, or watch a video interview where she discusses her motivations and procedures.
For those of you looking to mimic the experience of the bathers in the book, and perhaps achieve their same level of relaxation, you can find information about the hammams of Istanbul and how to visit them on the helpful Hammam Guide website. If you’re looking for something more succinct, you might find it on Frommer’s, Lonely Planet, or Trip Advisor.
by Michael Nordskog has just been released by the 
of photos of women taken over an eight-year period in the public baths of Istanbul and Bursa. In her words:
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