Sauna for one
Back in his bachelor days, our Japanese-language reporter Ahiruneko used to go to a sauna once or twice a week. Now, though, he’s got a wife and child, plus an apartment out in the suburbs that’s closer to the mountains than the office, and thus a long commute, leaving him with only enough time for one or two sauna days in an entire year. So in his quest for the optimal sauna/life balance, he decided to purchase a home sauna. Converting an entire room of his home into a sauna facility would be excessive in terms of cost and floorspace, so instead of doing that he went looking for a home sauna kit on Rakuten, where he found an assemble-it-yourself steam sauna kit for $112. All of the components shipped together in a large cardboard box, and Ahiruneko laid them out to see what he’d be working with.
The included instructions were written in less-than-fluent Japanese, but between them and the photos on the Rakuten product page. The tent almost looks like a giant down vest, with a slot for your neck and also two little slits that you can open if you want to reach your hands outside the tent. There’s also an exterior pocket where you can keep the remote control to turn the steam generator on and off or adjust the temperature. You fill it with water, and once the liquid gets hot enough to start turning into steam, it gets channeled through the side of the tent by the connecting tub and dispersed by the steam box, which you place inside the sauna with yourself. The dimensions of the tent are cozy, but there’s room to spare in which to fit the chair, and laying down the mat before your steam session will help keep your floor from getting damp. OK, with everything assembled, it was time to turn on the steam generator!
It took about 20 minutes for the steam to heat up, but when it did, entering the tent turned out to be surprisingly tricky, since the frame has a pair of connected pipes running horizontally across the front. But as startling as this setup looks when viewed from the outside, it was extremely relaxing for Ahiruneko on the inside. He’d purposely kept his expectations low about how high the temperature could get, but it turned out that the steam filling his home sauna was surprisingly hot. It wasn’t long until his body was sweating steadily, but his head being exposed kept the environment from feeling stifling or even stuffy. In time, though, Ahiruneko started to sweat from his face too, so he unzipped one of the arm holes so he could grab the remote control and turn down the temperature just a bit. He’d actually put a second remote control in the pocket too, the one for his TV, since having his own personal sauna means he can watch whatever he wants while steaming.
Sauna sillies
“America has got to be the only country in the world where people need energy drinks
to sit in front of a computer.”
“If it weren’t for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart,
some of us wouldn’t get any exercise at all.”
I consider my refusal to go to the gym today as “resistance training.”
So I went to a spa the other week and had a sauna for the first time so I’m sat there with 15 other naked men sweating then…
I burnt my mouth on the ladle trying to get a drink.
October 30th Birthdays
1980 – Sarah Carter, 1989 – Jonel Parish, 1971 – Nia Long, 1989 – Nastia Liukin
1946 – Henry Winkler, 1960 – Kevin Pollak, 1994 – Marcus Mariota, 1992 – Jorge Lopez