Last weekend we headed Northeast to check out Sisu + Löyly’s floating sauna on Devil’s Track Lake in Grand Marais, Minnesota. We had made reservations a month prior and the suspense was intense. Choosing which floating sauna to visit this fall was easy, there is only one public-access floating sauna in the United States and it belongs to Katie and her business. There are a few others in the works, but until they take their maiden voyages, this is the one!
I have enjoyed being a part of the growing interest in sauna here in the US, in particular Minnesota since returning from studying at the University of Tampere in January 2012. I somehow took it on as my personal mission to operate as a volunteer Ambassador of Finnish culture and that includes sauna, of course. My first sauna experience was in a community sauna at Salolampi Finnish Language Village in Bemidji, MN. To say that that experience was transformative is lacking the true intensity of the life-altering moment I first experienced löyly (that is steam produced in the sauna - and only the sauna - otherwise it is höyry for the non-sauna steam that gets produced in other contexts like cooking or powering of old-timey trains).
One of my favorite activities to do while living in Finland was to go shopping at thrift stores. I nearly always found something exciting to get and as my family quickly figured out when they came to visit and pick me up, I was pretty successful at finding many good teaching items, home decorations, books/DVDs, and clothing items, many of which I did not want to leave behind in Finland. Good thing they brought nearly empty suitcases!
Fall has barely started and it is already offering perfect conditions for soup. I would not have even considered making soup even a few days ago and I also may not want to be making any this weekend - it is supposed to get to 80°F (~27°C) here in Minneapolis. Today, however, my mind has been flooded with all kinds of soups to look forward to as the weather turns and stays cold. When I lived in Finland, the soups I remember having went beyond the often sited Lohikeitto (Salmon Soup) and Hernekeitto (Pea Soup). At the University of Oulu and University of Tampere, the student cafeteria often served a wide range of soups including the aforementioned Finnish staples, as well as varieties like carrot, carrot ginger, spinach, potato, beef stew, hotdog soup, even berry and mixed fruit varieties.
