Bath Shower Home Design

Finnish cabinet ministers do it, Russian hockey players do it, Koreans do it on a first date. Social bathing—known as "naked communion" in Japan—is an integral part of several cultures, strengthening bonds between family members, colleagues, and heads of state. In many countries it's also considered the proper way to welcome a foreign guest. Whether sauna or sento, banya or hammam, the shared bath is society's great leveler, its group hug, its collective sigh. "Not sampling the local bathing culture would be like not trying the local cuisine," says Melisse Gelula, co-founder of Well&Good NYC, an online wellness guide . And like any other institution integral to a society, this one has its rules, the first of which is to behave with churchlike decorum. In Finland, the sauna is the church, says Joonas Berghäll, co-director of the Finnish documentary Steam of Life. (Statistics bear him out: With just over five million inhabitants, Finland has roughly...

I am an old man in his sixtieth year. I have entered that decade of life which destroys the last illusion and beyond which lies death, swift or lingering, actuarial or real. I am also poor, incontrovertibly, humiliatingly poor, for the first time in my life. My total annual income , from a modest pension ($1980) and the interest ($168.75) from an equally modest savings account , is 6 percent of what I earned in my prime-and less than two thirds of the property tax I once paid on a five-bedroom home with swimming pool in Westchester County, New York. I am divorced and living alone in an alien city of 800,000 strangers. My aging body betrays me day by day; the ground I am losing now I lose forever. So I perceived myself, at any rate, when the plane from a foreign country dropped me in San Diego one night seven months ago. Behind me stretched an aimless, six-year, expatriate trail through the South Seas, Asia, and Latin America that began when divorce and its inevitable byproducts-seco...