Searching for saunas? Don’t sweat it
Though sitting naked in a hot, steamy room and whacking each other with birch switches has always been a popular pasttime in the Baltics, over the past few years the countries have taken the ancient tradition of the sauna to a whole new level.
A few groups of creative young entrepreneurs are now taking their love of saunas out onto the streets.
“Mobile Saunas” – basically large trucks with saunas rigged up in back – are the hottest thing to hit the Baltics for decades. Estonian enthusiasts have already built a small fleet of the saunas-on-wheels. Latvians have likewise managed to throw a few of the strange devices together.
Saunas can act as more than just a small room to keep people warm during the cold winter months. Canadian-Latvian Karlis Kalnins, creator of the Ponij Pirts mobile sauna, said the room could even be thought of as a path to cultural integration.
“One thing that’s interesting about all the cultures that are here - these northern cultures – [is that] they all get cold and everybody needs to get warm and get clean. What a perfect opportunity for cultural integration,” Kalnins said in an interview with the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts.
“To have people sit, get naked and sweat together and become clean, both physically and I suppose spiritually and physiologically,” he said.
In Estonia, meanwhile, a group of firemen have turned an old 1968 Ford fire truck into a mobile sauna so the firefighters can go straight from a burning building t...
Full story...
Marriage, Estonian style ...TALLINN - You meet that perfect person. You fall in love, get married, and have children. That’s the way it goes, right? Not necessarily.
In Estonia, people are just not getting married anymore. Take Karmen Olman, who has been with Ragnar Tuusk for seven years.
“I don’t think [marriage] would really change anything. I haven’t seriously thought about getting married,” she said.
It’s a sentiment that many others echo. Only half as many Estonians tie the knot today as they did about 30 years ago. Many opt to live in “vabaabielu,” or common-law marriage. According to Statistics Estonia, 58 percent of children were born to unmarried parents in 2003.
But why is marriage becoming obso...
Sinking in a quagmire of debt ...RIGA - Gints, a project manager for a small company, and his girlfriend Guna, employed at a leading Latvian company, are both in their mid 20s. Last year they bought an apartment together in Riga. Now they are struggling to meet their payments.
“At the moment my expenses are higher than my salary and if it would not be for my boyfriend I would not have money for food,” Guna said.
The couple used to have separate accounts because Guna didn’t want to feel dependent, but now she needs her man to help her with even basic needs.
The couple claims it’s not carelessness on their part that has put them in this situation. As Girts explains, they calculated for a long time before deciding to...
Quiet genius who brought the East ...TALLINN - The Koran is undoubtedly one of the most important texts in world culture, so it’s maybe not so surprising that the book is selling well in Estonia. No one thought, however, it would sell as well as it did.
The truly astonishing thing is that it took until December 2007 for the book to be published in Estonian.
There is no doubt the Koran would not have been translated at all if weren’t for the work of one remarkable man, Haljand Udam – geologist, scientist, linguist, translator, writer, and genius.
The Baltic Times spoke to the friends and family of the man who single-handedly made the most important cultural event of the year in Estonia possible, including his widow who ...
It’s spring, it’s Cinema Spring!...VILNIUS - Woody Allen, Alexandr Sokurov, Andrzej Wajda and Julio Medem are among the masters of world cinema who have films on release this year. But movies of such caliber are unlikely to see much distribution in the Baltic countries. Here, the only way local audiences will be able to enjoy them is to catch them at a film festival.
Lithuania’s preeminent movie fest, Cinema Spring (Kino Pavasaris in Lithuanian), is launched in Vilnius again this coming week. Due to be held on April 3-17, film lovers in the Lithuanian capital will be able to enjoy some remarkable celluloid works of art.
Cinema Spring is already one of the most popular film festivals in the Nordic and Baltic region. Now ...
The Baltic's suffering teachers...Life is no picnic for Baltic schoolteachers. The sheer workload forces teachers to put in overtime hours nearly every week. Wages are so low it is barely possible to survive.
“The salary is not enough, because there is so much to do. It [wages] has been going up over the past few years, but it is not even enough to compensate for inflation. Basically, I end up having to work two full time jobs at the same place… I am a mother and I cannot stay at school until 9 p.m. everyday,” one Latvian school teacher said.
The situation has become so bad that teachers unions in all three countries have threatened to strike numerous times in the past year. Lithuanian unions have recently followed t...
Mystery of the three-handed saint ...VILNIUS - One of the must-see stops on any tour of Vilnius is the cathedral, for there is more to this grandiose display of Neo-Classicism than meets the eye. Besides the crypt, which snakes beneath the building to reveal a history that stretches back almost a millennium, the cathedral’s essential highlight is the Chapel of St Casimir, a flamboyant Baroque masterpiece.
Vilnius Cathedral itself occupies the site of what was once an ancient, open pagan temple revered by Lithuanians and dedicated to the worship of Perkunas, god of thunder and fire.
According to some written sources, toads, grass snakes and other sacred creatures were kept nearby, ready for sacrifice on an altar that ...
CLASSIFIEDS