Sauna, Finnish style!

This is the entrance to the sauna.  You enter through the shower room.

 

 

This is the sauna stove.  It is strategically placed in the corner of the sauna.  It is a wood burning stove, this makes the steam smell good.

Once inside the sauna you sit on these wooden benches, fortunately for us they were covered with towels to keep us from blistering our rears.  You either wrap a towel around you or go bare naked.  Finns go naked, so we all went bare a-- naked.  It was fun.  When the wood heats up it smells very good inside the sauna.  The sauna took two steps:  first you go in and sit down and sweat and sweat as someone throws water onto the rocks.  The first step lasted about 30 to 40 minutes.  We showered, went into a lounge area, sat down, drank water or pop and cooled down.  The last step was we reentered the sauna, threw more water on the rocks and really steamed up this time.  We didn't leave until all the water was gone from the sauna bucket.  We then reshowered, dressed  and rejoined the party upstairs.

Notice the little wooden bucket and wooden ladle.  Water is taken from the bucket and thrown onto the hot rocks on the sauna stove, this produces really hot steam.