Wild Ice & SaunaYear round

Sauna & Supper

The order is the event

The sauna is not the event and the dinner is not the event. The order is the event — hot, cold, sit, eat — and it is the ordinary Swedish way round, not something invented for visitors.

You arrive in the late afternoon, and the first hour is unhurried and largely social. Rounds in the heat, out into the cold, back to a bench, repeat as long as it suits. Nobody is timing it and there is no schedule to keep.

Then the food, which is deliberately simple and eaten with your hair still wet. Cured fish, bread, something warm from one pot, beer or a small strong drink. Anything elaborate would be the wrong register for a table of people wrapped in towels.

What it is actually for

What this is actually for is the conversation. Sweden runs an enormous amount of its social life through this sequence, and the reason is that a sauna removes the props — no phones, no watches, nothing to look at but each other.

It works particularly well for a group who have spent a week travelling together and have run out of things to say about the scenery.

Year round, and summer is not the wrong season for it. The cold end is a lake rather than a hole in the ice, the light lasts until midnight, and you eat outside afterwards.

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