A bowl of Korean noodles similar to the one I had for dinner during my night at King Sauna. Image via Wikipedia
Korean-style public saunas, also known as jjimjjilbangs, have become the mega-stores of public bathing. New construction is taking place the world over, as Koreans emigrate from their homeland and want to take a piece of home with them. Each new jjimjilbang is built larger than the last.
Several companies have established themselves as name brands in the budding Korean bath house industry. One of the leaders is the King Sauna brand. At the moment, they have jjimjjilbang locations outside New York, Dallas and Chicago. All are large facilities. Each one has a gender-segregated bathing area, where clothing is forbidden. When you have washed yourself clean in showers, rested in the hot tubs, and enjoyed the steam room and sauna, you can don a simple, unflattering uniform and enter the co-ed facility. In the co-ed area you can enjoy traditional Korean sauna domes built from rocks, minerals, even gold; each gives a unique benefit. Among the saunas is a Korean restaurant and several different styles of comfortable chairs. All three are open 24 hours.
So, after a marathon business trip a few weeks ago put me at Newark airport at 5pm on a weeknight with a morning appointment in Massachusetts. There was bad weather in New York. 1010 WINS had little time for other news because the traffic was so snarled, I headed the short distance up the New Jersey Turnpike to the Pallisades Park and King Sauna to relax while I waited out the rush hour.
After spending the first hour soaking and steaming away the stresses of the trip so far in the naked area, I grabbed a uniform and headed down to one of the TV rooms to catch a traffic report. The chairs in there are huge overstuffed recliners. I settled in, listening to whatever celebrity gossip was the breathless headline of the day, and leaned back in the chair.
I woke up, and the news wasn’t on anymore. It was now a baseball game — In the bottom of the 7th inning. I found a clock. It was nearly 9. I napped for about 3 hours! It was at that point that I realized just how worn out I was from my trip so far, and I shouldn’t be driving anywhere that night.
I walked over to the restaurant and ordered a bowl of Korean noodles with a variety of toppings. After that I cooked myself in the Bulhanjeungmok for a little while. The Bulhanjeungmok is a wood-heated dome sauna in the style of the traditional Korean charcoal kiln. Outside the entrance, they show the overnight preparations of the room, and when the fire goes out around 6am, they use it to bake eggs. Signs caution visitors not to wear anything except for the cotton uniform inside. Right outside the door is a basket of heavy burlap blankets. The norm seemed to be to grab two and duck inside the small door.
I grabbed my two blankets and ducked through the door. It is the hottest sauna I have ever been inside. The sauna was lit by a single bulb, recessed deep in one of the walls. Hanging from another wall was an oven thermometer. I checked it out, and in the dim light and the buckets of sweat already pouring down my face, I could only tell the needle was somewhere between 400-450°F (205-230°C). Wow.
I took one of my blankets, and folded it and laid it down on the floor. I then knelt down on it like many of the others were doing. I laid the second blanket beside me instead of draping it over my head like others were doing. Most of the others in the Bulhanjeungmok were middle-aged Korean women in what appeared to be a meditative trance. I managed to stay in for about 10 minutes. Most of the women who were in there when I came in were still there when I left.
Right across the room from the Bulhanjeungmok is the ice sauna, which is basically a walk-in freezer. I sat in there until I stopped sweating. Tried out a few more of the lower temperature dome saunas, leafed through a paper, and cooked myself one more time in the Bulhanjeungmok. By then it was about 11pm. I went back to the men’s area, discarded my sweaty uniform in the laundry bins, rinsed off in the shower, soaked in the cold tub for a few more minutes, brushed my teeth with a complimentary toothbrush, donned a fresh uniform and found another recliner to spend the night.
I had a reasonably restful night there (but I can have a reasonably restful night on an airplane, in coach). I woke up once around 2am and took a walk to see what was going on. There was a large number of people who also spent the night. There was an equal mix of men and women. Most were of Korean descent and in their 40′s to 60′s. Even the men’s bath was still a hive of activity. And for those of you who hear bath house and think of something seedy, there was absolutely nothing untoward going on there.
At 4:30am my phone alarm went off and I headed up to the men’s bath again, just as the cleaning crew was finishing their nightly scrub of the place. I headed first for the sauna, then drenched myself in the icy shower right outside, then took a round in the steam room. After that I headed for one of the shower stalls, showered off, shaved with a complimentary razor, used their ample supply of complimentary toiletries to freshen up, and headed downstairs to pay my bill: $48.00. Not bad for a pretty restful night’s sleep, several hours of sauna, dinner, overnight parking and toiletries for the morning. To get that price, you need to ask the parking attendant for a coupon when you arrive, but now you know.
I grabbed a cup of coffee at a nearby gas station, and was across the George Washington Bridge by 5:30, heading up I95 into the rising sun.
If I got stuck in the area again, I would definitely spend the night here again. For the money and relaxation, it can’t be beat. If course, if I planned better, I would have found a hotel with a sauna along my route.
Have you ever spent the night in a Korean public sauna? Let us know about your experiences in the comments.
Most of the time, Startup Sauna has little to do with a real sauna — It is an early-stage accelerator program for technology start-ups based in Russia and Northern Europe. I’m sure it is so named because their six-week intensive program to transform your fledgling company into the next Rovio makes you sweat like you were in a sauna.
Successful companies then get to move to silicon valley in the US for three more months to try to secure funding. That must make you sweat like you are in the former Sauna World Championships sauna.
This week on The Next Web, interviewer Hermione Way visited with four of the Startup Sauna crew members Palo Alto, CA to discuss Startup Sauna and some of the companies that have participated in the program. Naturally, they held the interview in the sauna in the Finnish way: Naked, save for their laptops.
Ms. Way offers that the next interview will be even more popular, because she will only allow iPhones.
If you are visiting Silicon Valley, there are many public saunas in the greater Bay Area. However, unless you are really concerned about preserving your modesty (or passing the YouTube content filters) we don’t recommend taking your MacBook or iPhone into the sauna as heat and humidity are not kind to electronics.
Steam of Life, the award-winning Finnish documentary of men in the sauna is set to air in the USA next week on the PBS show POV. The film, called Miesten vuoroin Finnish, is a series of beautifully shot interviews with Finnish men who bare themselves and their souls to the camera. It has won several awards for its beautiful cinematography and heartfelt storytelling.
The film is scheduled to air at 10pm on Tuesday August 2, but you should check your local listings. If your local PBS channel chooses not to show it, or you aren’t in an area where you can get PBS, the film will be available to watch on the POV website from August 3 through November 1, 2011.
Apress release on the POV website describes the film:
Among the interesting things we learn from Steam of Life is that portable saunas can appear anywhere in Finland — in trailers, tepees, cars, even phone booths — at a moment’s notice. We also learn that Finnish men of all shapes, sizes and ages are not the least bit self-conscious about being nude, either in front of each other or in front of the filmmakers’ cameras (or behind the cameras — the crew was naked, too). We also learn that Finnish men, despite their reputation for not being communicative, are almost unstoppable once they get talking in their quiet way about their lives. They speak from a deep emotional need to share their experiences, and from a special place, the sauna, where they shed social inhibitions and distinctions along with their clothes.
To film the scenes in the sauna, the crew used 16mm film cameras. They had to slowly acclimate the cameras to the sauna temperatures of up to 200F (93C) to ensure they worked properly.
POV has posted a trailer on YouTube (embedded above) where some of the nudity has been blurred out. As a longtime fan of POV, my guess is they will offer two versions of the film to the individual PBS stations: A censored one and an uncensored one. They will choose which version to air. The film’s runtime has also been cut from 86 to 60 minutes to fit into the hour-long TV slots in the USA.
POV, now in its 24th season on PBS, features the works of today’s best independent documentary filmmakers.
Stephen Colmant published an interesting tidbit on Sauna Times today showing that people who are considered neurotic have a different physical response to hot environments than “normal” people. The study, published in 2003, found that people who tend to be anxious, fearful, sensitive and self-critical also tended to sweat less in the heat of the sauna and found it to be very uncomfortable.
Stephen (a licensed psychologist with a PhD to prove it) posits that we might be able to improve these people’s personalities by regularly exposing them to a sauna. This might just be causation, but if you’re planning a study to test this hypothesis Stephen, I’m willing to volunteer my father-in-law as a subject for you. Perhaps with the USDA’s preferred sauna temperature, might they also be good candidates?
She is sitting on the top bench, to get the best effect from the sauna,
She makes the sauna feel hotter by sprinkling a ladle of water onto the rocks,
The stove has plenty of rocks,
The temperature is shown at 90°F, but we’ll assume that the thermometer is labeled wrong, and it’s really 90°C (194°F), which is a very respectable temperature for a sauna, and
A pig is singing relaxing sounds to the woman.
Wait, what is that pig doing in the sauna?
This is a public service campaign by the USDA, but its goal is not to encourage sauna use with your livestock, but to help eliminate food poisoning by reminding US home cooks to check the temperature of their foods with a thermometer before serving them.
It is also interesting since the displayed temperature in the sauna, while much too low for a real sauna, is right in the middle of the “danger zone” for safely storing foods.
Sauna from Finland, a Finnish trade association that promotes the use of Finnish saunas is running a survey and contest. One lucky winner will get an all-expense paid trip to Finland to enjoy a sauna for themselves.
The survey is to gauge foreigners’ opinions of the Finnish sauna. I took it, and it takes about 5 minutes to complete.
According to the official contest rules, the contest is open until August 5, 2011 and the drawing will take place sometime in August. We’ve got our entry submitted!
Glenn over at Sauna Times posted on this topic yesterday and said there are two ways to throw water on the rocks: Soft and softer. I’m a person who thrives on hard numbers, so this got me thinking.
The photo with this post is of the interior of a pretty typical sauna and heater you will find at most US hotels, clubs and gyms. It shows a Scandia heater made by Am-Finn Sauna and Steam in Eagle, Idaho. According to their website, they are the preferred vendor for the YMCA, Bally, Gold’s Gym and LA Fitness, most universities and the US Government. In my experience, they are right. Most public saunas in the USA use their brand of heater.
This heater has a shallow pan at the top to hold the rocks which prevents water from getting on the elements. Their website validates what Clint says: users can “pour water on the rocks without risk to the heater elements and control wiring.”
These heaters have an internal thermostat that limits their temperature to 190°F (88°C) in the wiring box. Looking at the way these are made, my guess is that the rock pan gets to somewhere around 250-300ºF (120-150°C). (I’ll have to figure out a way to look natural bringing my IR thermometer into the sauna with me the next time I go to the gym).
My guess is there are between 25 and 35 pounds of rock in these heaters. Mikkel Aaland says that hornblende is one of the preferred sauna rocks. A few trips to the engineering toolbox, and we find that we’ve got between 200 and 650 BTU to dissipate. A few more trips there and we find that means we can vaporize between 3 and 9 ounces of water before the rocks get too cold to do their job anymore.
In my experience, 4 ounces or 1/2 cup, seems to be the practical limit. That wood sauna ladle in the photo holds about 7 ounces of water.
So when you are in that hotel sauna, about 1/2 a ladle or 1/2 a small foam coffee cup is all you can put on the rocks at a time. Any more than that, and you’ll just cool off the stove.
With the power in those sauna stoves and their element designs, you can probably splash water on the rocks about once every 5-10 minutes, giving you a reason to use that sauna timer.
Compare that to a similar size heater made by Harvia in Finland. These hold about 130 lb of rocks and do not limit the temperature of the stove. They control only by the temperature of the sauna room, and the rocks touch the heating elements so they can get hotter.
Or look at the stove in a Russian banya. These stoves hold 10 or more tons of rock and heat them to more than 800°F! Russian banya enthusiasts say that this high temperature gives the best steam.
Stay tuned for a future post where we look at what happens when you throw water on those sauna rocks.
Here it is, the second day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, which is a good time to make your vihta, venik, sauna broom or sauna whisk. According to conventional wisdom, the best time to make one is just after the leaves on a tree have reached their full size.
To get started, you want to first find a suitable tree:
Birch vihta are said to help with muscle and joint pains, heal wounds, and help clean phlegm out of your lungs.
Oak vihta are said to make the skin smooth, it has anti-inflammatory properties, and acts as a mild sedative that removes stress. Some sites caution that an oak vihta is appropriate for people with oily skin.
Eucalyptus vihta are great for people with colds or other respiratory problems, and using the vihta transfers its essential oils onto your skin.
You can experiment with other types of leaves. Others report that in some areas lime and even nettle are good choices.
When you have selected your tree, you want to gather a full handful of young, thin flexible branches each about 2 feet (60 cm) long from your chosen tree. Remove enough leaves from the tree-side of each branch so you have a comfortable handle. Gather the leaves together into a flower-bouquet style bunch and bind them together at the handle using rope, tape, or even thin twigs or vines. If my directions are confusing, the video below shows an attractive finn performing all the steps.
If you don’t live near trees, many Russians offer veniks (their word for vihta) for sale on eBay, Etsy, even Sears.
Once you have your vihta, now you need to prepare it for use. Soak it in a bucket of warm water and bring it into the sauna with you to soften it up. If it’s fresh, it should be ready to use quickly. If it is dry or frozen, you may have to wait until your second round in the sauna until it is ready to use.
Once you have a good sweat going you or a friend can use the vihta as a massage tool. The techniques are hard to describe, but the video below does a good job of showing the techniques used in a Russian Platza, their version of this massage.
When you are done in the sauna, hang up your vihta to dry — If you’ve made it from good leaves, it should last you several sauna visits. Take your soaking bucket of water it into the shower with you. The water, now infused with many of the tree’s essential oils can be used as a shampoo and body wash.
Today is the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere and the first day of winter in the southern hemisphere. This is the time of year for a unique ritual at the south pole: New members are initiated into the 300 Club. Talk about contrast therapy.
The event takes place at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. On a day when the outside air temperature reaches -100°F (-73°C), a brave few fire up the sauna in the research station and set the temperature to 200°F (93°C). The participants warm themselves up in the sauna, then head outside into the cold. The bravest attempt circle the ceremonial south pole before headed back into the sauna to warm up. Of course, to qualify, you have to do it all naked except for your boots.
.
Glenn over at Sauna Times 
Entries (RSS)
