I’m naked and sweating profusely, my makeup slowly sliding down both sides of my face. I wipe my face, smearing the towel’s screen-printed logo with streaks of mascara, and as I lean back against the cool stone of the bathroom wall, I think “Yes, this is the best Burger King I’ve ever been to.”
This is the part where the record would skip and I would cover myself with a Burger King bath towel. “Yeah, that’s me,” I’d say, staring directly into the camera. “You may wonder how I ended up in this situation.” It’s because I’m in Helsinki, in a well-appointed Burger King that has a full sauna hidden underneath its tasteful timber and stone accented dining area. The sauna opened last spring, and before anyone even sat on the wooden benches, sweating through their paper seat covers, it was already the world’s only fast-food sauna.
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Why? The easiest answer is, well, because it’s Finland—and that’s probably the most accurate answer, too. “Sauna is a year-round part of our lives here,” Eve Turunen, a Burger King staffer, said as she led me through the restaurant. “We have a sauna with our friends and our family. We have a Christmas sauna, a midsummer sauna—all year.”
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