Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Sauna in Tampere

The University of Texas' Radio-TV-Film Department (and College of Communication, in general) have had a long, interesting exchange of students and faculty with Tampere University. Several of their faculty have been in Texas over the years and several of our have visited Tampere at different times. The single thing that various people, notably Horace Newcomb and Tom Schatz, have exclaimed about the most was going to the sauna with Kaarle Nordenstreng, a legendary global media studies and journalism professor, who was one of the main activists in and chroniclers of the New World Information Order debate in the 1970s. (More on that one of these days in another post.) Here is Kaarle looking quite modern and professional, but he is also an enthusiast guide to the more primordial delights of sauna.

Kaarle, Mika Aaltola (a Tampere international relations professor temporarily at University of Minnesota), and I organized a University of Texas & University of Minnesota grad seminar in Tampere, Finland. While quite a few Finnish students had come to UT over the years, not nearly enough UT students had gone the other way, so we wanted to try to help them take advantage of the opportunity. Taking groups of American students abroad to see other cultures, media systems, and ways of life is one of my very favorite forms of teaching. Nothing replaces seeing a place with your own eyes, talking to people there, etc. Here are those of our group who went to the sauna, along with some Tampere University media students who had been at UT before.

One of the most interesting things that the group did was take a field trip to Rajaportin, the oldest sauna in town, founded in 1906.



Pilgrimage to Rajaportin

The outside and main front rooms would necessarily tip off what you are about to experience. There is a nice little restaurant inside the main building. People have meetings there, others have a drink to build up their courage.


The heart of this place, however, is truly primal, as in primal shock, primal scream and primal therapy. It is heated, in the traditional style by putting wood in a stove under the area where you sit.

There is a classic painting by Finland's most famous artist of the national-romantic period, Akseli Gallen-Kallela (more on him in another post), of what this arrangement looked like out in the countryside. You have the fire/oven underneath and people sitting above.

Another little detail: people do this naked. Wearing a bathing suit marks you out as a real wimp. In family or village saunas, like the one in the painting, everyone would be together.

In traditional urban ones, they separate women and men into separate rooms above the fire. In the less traditional ones, or ones where part of the point is to run out and jump into a cold lake at a public beach after heating up a bit, people do wear bathing suits. This threw a bit of tremor through the students, but everyone seems to have gotten into it.

When you throw in some more logs, as you can see in the photo,
and then, even better, throw some water in place above the fire to make steam, as Kaarle immediately did, the temperature can rise to to nearly 80 degrees celsius or around 180 degrees fahrenheit.

So when you walk up the stairs to the area where people are sitting over the proverbial fiery furnace, it literally takes your breath away and makes you wonder if you had suddenly been whisked to another alternative universe where you had become a fire eater in the circus. It is, literally, unbelievable until you do it.

You hang in there as long as you can, usually 4 or 5 minutes, then go outside (demurely wearing a towel in most cases) and socialize with everyone, have something to drink, etc.

Here are some people sitting just outside the entrance to the sauna.

Then you do it again. At this point, Kaarle suggested adding a traditional refinement, whacking yourself about the chest and shoulders with a bundle of birch twigs. Interestingly, people really got into this, including me, which surprised us all a bit. It is refreshing in a weird but satisfying way. Definitely adds to the primal quality of the experience. You can also douse yourself with a tub of water before to add to the steaminess or after to cool down a bit.

I think most of us did this cycle of heat, water, relax outside 3 or 4 times, whereas the true afficionado would probably keep right on going much longer.

We are thinking hard about adding a sauna to the old ranchito back in Texas. Then some would say that summer in Texas is a sauna. Stay tuned.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

You forgot to say that the sweat pours off you in gallons. Even if, like me, you aren't that much of a sweat-er in normal life. That's _why_ you need to go out and drink something in between visits to the upstairs part.
There's also a room downstairs (behind the stove) where you can sluice yourself off after a sweating session with buckets of room-temperature water out of a cistern (which feels cold) or cold water out of a hose (which feels Arctic). I don't know what guys do on their side, but this is where women wash their hair. There is a handy floor drain in this room. THEN you can either go back upstairs, or wrap up in a towel and go out to the sunny terrace to rehydrate a bit.
I agree, it's totally primal. I've done saunas in hotels and health clubs and things -- even in Finland -- but this one is a whole new order of magnitude, on the primal/tribal scale.

Sandy