SaunaScape

A site that showed up on my radar a few weeks ago is Hotsprung, subtitled “Hot Water and How to Get Into It.”

Most interesting is the post on the Dogo Onsen in Japan. According to Hotsprung, it was the inspiration for the bath house in the excellent movie Spirited Away(which probably deserves its own post here).

Hotsprung also has a very informative post on the Onsen, a style of Japanese Bath, plus some first-hand reviews of several spas in the Seattle and Vancouver area.

Take a trip over and check out Hotsprung.

Photo by Paint Monkey on Flickr

In our quest to find new and interesting sauna tidbits to share with you, we spend a lot of time combing the web looking for information.

This weekend, we stumbled upon Sauna Times, a blog run by Glenn, a “Joe American” living in Minnesota. We find the similarities between his site and ours uncanny, right down to the choice of the background images. He seems to be quite a personable fellow. So much so that with this post, Sauna times now has a place in our links page.

What really caught our attention on his site though, was his post “Hotel Sauna: How to Take One.” A laminated copy now resides in our briefcase for our next stay at a hotel with a sauna.

We have noticed that most hotel (and health club) saunas, especially here in the USA, tend to be overly dry from disuse. This becomes part of the problem: If the sauna is dry and hot, it irritates your respiratory system. Most  forbid you from throwing water on the rocks, so the only solution is to turn the temperature down. You end up sitting in a warm room, which really doesn’t do much for you.

Sauna Times has a simple solution for all of this: As soon as you check in, turn on the sauna full blast. Give it 20 minutes or so to heat, then:

Flush the hotel sauna. Generously douse with fresh water:

• the bench area where you’ll be sitting.
• the hotel sauna rocks with water (they should bark back, if not, the sauna is lame, call housekeeping if you’re especially irritated).
• anywhere else you feel the urge.

Why?  underused hotel saunas can build up dust and stagnation, this ‘cleansing’ will get your hotel sauna fresh and ready to rock.

After this, reset the timer again, and give the sauna another 30 minutes to recover from this washing, and you’re ready to begin the sauna process, which Glenn distills succinctly: “It’s like the instructions on a box of laundry detergent: sauna, rinse, chill, repeat.”

[Hotel Sauna: How to Take One] Sauna Times

Mihael Cankar, a Finn living in Helsinki, has been maintaining his Finnish Sauna site since 1994. He has achieved his mission of bringing information about sauna culture to the internet.

He covers all of the important topics for the potential sauna-goer: How to Use the Sauna, Health Issues, building and maintaining Your Own Sauna, and the History and Traditions of the sauna. He rounds out his own content with judicious links to content by others, including Dr. Weil and a first-time sauna goer.

Pay his site a visit, and you’ll never wonder what Avantouinti means again.

[cankar.org/sauna]

Plans for Kalle Hoffman's current sauna, rendered in beautiful ASCII from his sauna building FAQ

For those of you looking to build your own sauna, a good reference point is Kalle Hoffman’s Sauna Page and Sauna Building FAQ. Kalle is a Finnish software developer living in the San Francisco area. His pages recount lessons learned while building a few of his own saunas.

Better yet is his FAQ, which is more a digest of interesting e-mail correspondence he’s had dating back to 1995. It’s a cross between a bully pulpit and a show and tell, but very informative. Most interesting are his collection of ASCII sauna plans that he’s shared with his correspondents over the years. He also has plans for The Kallenator, a sauna stove made from two old 40-gallon hot water heaters.

If you’ve never seen it, take an hour and watch the excellent documentary from the NOVA series on PBS of the Roman Bath.  The video is embedded below. but if it’s not working, you can watch it on Hulu, or buy it from Amazon.

If you’re interested in learning more about Roman bathing culture, be sure to peruse the NOVA compainion site, or Wikipedia’s entry on roman bathing.