Summer....and sauna!

After-storm sunset across one of the many lakes in the park

So, my past couple of weeks living in a National Park (Patvinsuon kansallispuisto) have been pretty much...mahtava! Awesome!  Anyways, I have millions and millions of friends that keep me company wherever I go, all I have to do is share a little of my blood occasionally...

These little butterflies are always very brave and tend to surround me and land on anything while I am doing my plots

My average day starts at 6am, but it feels like midday by this point as the sun has already been up for almost 4 hours at this point.  After breakfast I go to the forest and count trees...lots and lots and lots of trees.  This is interspersed with small breaks of mosquito mass murder...and of course taking pictures of cool things that I have found.  A friend of mine said "I take photos of things I find interesting..." and I think is also true for me.  After counting trees for several hours, I try to get back to the house/cottage by 6pm.  Then make dinner, light the sauna, do a little reading...have a sauna, wash the dishes, go for a walk, go to bed.  Repeat. I live in an old farmhouse with no electricity or running water.  Instead, we have an outhouse, several wooden ovens (direct translation), and a gas stove.  Oh right...and 2 saunas!  because there are no showers or anything of that nature, we have traditional sauna to wash everyday.  There are 2 wood-stove type devices.  One is below a large water tank and is used for making hot water.  The other is the kiuas and is the actual sauna stove/oven.  So, in order to take a proper sauna....

Ahhh...a summer evening in Finland...about 11:30pm. It doesn't really get any darker than this.

1.  Light fire in kiuas and under water

2.  Stoke fire

3.  Use hot water (mixed with cold) to make warm washing water in buckets

4.  Use hot water to make löylyvesi (water for throwing onto kiuas...to make the steam)

5.  Take off all of your clothes (naked is the only way to sauna)

6.  Climb on benches and heitä löylyä (throw water onto the stove to make the steam)

7. Sweat

8. Use vasta if desired.  This is a small bundle of birch branches that you dip in water, steam the leaves briefly on the stove, then beat yourself with.  Seriously.  Beat yourself with hot branches while sweating in a small steamy room.  I highly recommend you try it some day.

9. Take a little break and go outside

10.  Return to sauna and sweat some more. use vasta some more if you would like to.

11.  When you are done sweating, it is time to wash. Use the warm water and pour some onto yourself. Wash as you would in a shower, use the rest of the water to rinse.

12.  You are now done. Dry, dress, and drink water (and/or beer!).  

So now....go have a sauna...for your health!!!

So on that note...here are a selection of photos of what I have found interesting so far this summer!

Sunny morning after a big rainstorm that left the grass saturated. 

Another perfect summer evening.  The only problem is that there are so many things waiting to eat you that it is hard to stop long enough to take a photo

Lakka or cloudberry.  They are now blooming and in August the fruit will be ready.  There is a special kind of insanity that takes over every Finn when it comes to cloudberries. 

The aptly named suokukka, or swamp flower

Kielo, or lily-of-the-valley, has been blooming over the past couple of weeks.  It makes carpets across the floor of some forests and leaves the evening air smelling simply amazing.  It is the national flower of Finland...an excellent choice in my opinion!

Cottongrass (of some sort) fills the edges of some bogs and wet forests here.  Masses of it look really neat carpeting the forest floor in waves of white tufts

One of the friendly butterflies was enjoying blueberry nectar when it was ambushed by a ghost spider.  Too bad for the butterfly, but definitely a lucky day for the spider; that would make a juicy meal!

Green lacewings.  The veins on its wings are actually covered in thousands of stiff black hairs...you can see them making a dark halo around the edge of the wings.  I never would've known this before I took these pictures!  Lacewings are voracious predators with an appetite for aphids. 

Orchids!!  Yes, the first ones are finally out and I found this yellow coralroot in one of my plots.  Corallorhiza trifida, or harajuuri in finnish.  It is an orchid with no leaves or chlorophyll and it gets all of its energy from decaying organic material.

Regeneration survey (tree counting) purgatory.  Plots like this definitely receive a few colourful words of frustration...

This is my awesome work truck.  Aka Fiat Bravo.  So far, so good!  5.3L/100km (44.1 mpg) is alright even with European gas prices.