FINNISH SUMMER COTTAGE

We moved to Helsinki last September so Jon could attend a year long program at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland to study wood architecture. We have made incredible friendships with amazing people through it, and it was to our great delight that the students in the Wood Program were able to get a cabin in the woods for the last weekend of May.

The winter has been long and arduous, and I almost thought it would never end. But when spring came, it brought the sun and how glorious it was. The formerly frozen land turns into a jungle, every living thing reaching greedily for sun.

It is tradition here in Finland to escape from the city for a few weeks in the summer to a country cottage and enjoy the short and sweet summer, reconnecting with nature. Finland is filled with lakes and forests, so you don’t have to go far to find yourself in the thick of it. It actually looks a lot like the Upper Peninsula in Michigan but with no people around. And a fundamental part of the Finnish cottage life is sauna, where friends can sit around in the buck, have a beer, and sweat it out. There is something almost archaic about traditional sauna. Chopping firewood, stoking the sauna fire, collecting water for loyly, waiting hours for the sauna to get hot, swimming in the lake with sand or dirt under your toes, grilling sausage outside, drinking beer. Unlike the uncomfortably dry American saunas I was accustomed to, traditional Finnish saunas are kept hot with loyly, their word for steam. Throwing water on the rocks keep the temperature up and the moisture high and the sweat dripping.

We spent the entire weekend sauna-ing, swimming and eating, on repeat. Our Swiss friend taught us how to make zopf bread, a thick braided bread. Our Japanese friend made us hand cut udon. We grilled yakatori over an open fire. Our Finnish friend played the guitar, and our South American friends instigated a drunken dance party. Filled with slow mornings and even slower warm afternoons, the weekend was an idyllic bookmark a year with the Wood Program.