My Finnish girlfriend's family had an all-year-round holiday cottage in the archipelago. It had a wooden sauna built on the edge of the sea - with a boat jetty to give access to deeper water. When you had had enough of the sauna heat you could open the door - run down the jetty - and jump into the water. Repeat a couple of times - then retire to the adjacent lounge for fire-toasted sausage and weak beer.
The Baltic is a shallow sea - and not very salty owing to the rivers feeding it and the narrow Kattegat channel to the Atlantic. So it has quite a wide temperature variation over the year - frozen in winter - pleasantly warmer after high summer.
My girlfriend said that many people in the winter would roll in the snow after their sauna. She found it too hard at -20C - so she preferred to plunge into a hole cut in the sea ice.
On holiday there with her and her family she wore only her bikini bottom the whole week. Except when we went for a swim - then she would say "No point in getting it wet". In her younger teenage years she went riding on her horse bareback in all respects.
I've never been quite as comfortably English ever since that holiday. A stranger in a strange land.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
