Europhile: C'est ma vie!

Extreme Swimming in Prague - An Exercise in Spatial Awareness

I suspected that swimming pools would be a bit different here. Perhaps, I thought, the water would be warmer. The pools might be smaller. The, ahem, attire could be different. There might not be lockers. The showers could be co-ed -- the locker rooms could be co-ed. There might be naked children running about everywhere and women breast-feeding in plain sight . Heck, there could be naked adults running about! This is Europe, after all.

Nothing really prepared me for the reality, which was, quite simply, very normal. Except for one small, tiny, almost un-noticeable thing, really: the pool had no lane lines. I wasn't ready for that.

The pool was an obstacle course, chaos theory in action. If you could have seen it from above, I have a suspicion it would have been reminiscient of ducks in a small pool. That is, ducks, in a small pool, on speed. You swam and looked up, swam and looked up. If there was someone in your way, it was common courtesy to begin swimming diagonally. If this took you into the paths of other swimmers, you could switch directions, but it was really up to you. If you started out on the left side, you might very easily end up on the right side when you got to the other side. Of course, actually getting to the other side was apparently optional as well, as many swimmers decided that 80% was very nearly there, and so, good enough for them. Perhaps they chose this because there was no good place to hold on to when you reached the side. Another common courtesy was to swim breast stroke. I believe this was to allow swimmers to more easily see the person swimming directly toward them, although my first deduction was that Czechs simply had one leg shorter than the other, (causing the aforementioned diagonal swimming).

At first I tried to swim against the stream. Or, perhaps, the flood. I swam straight, hoping to encourage the depth perception my fellow swimmers, and going under them when they charged me. This was working until on butterflyer I'd like to dub the tank came in. That was my signal to start dodging with the rest of them.

The Czech people are some of the nicest, meekest, intellectually stimulating, fun-loving people in the world. But the way they organize their swimming pools makes me wonder about their organizational skills.

Ahoj.

posted by europhile @ 03:49