Since I’ve gone back to swimming recently, and since I made some comments about Iceland the Obligatory Naked Shower (although it’s possible they were in the first version that I deleted and rewrote), I thought I’d write a whole post about Iceland and swimming.
Most western countries are pretty big drinkers and Iceland is no exception. The alcohol is expensive and access is controlled by the government but Icelanders still like a drink. But whereas in the UK, the biggest social scene is the pub, Icelanders are more likely to go to the pool than the pub – or at least, more likely than we are. We just don’t have that in the UK. You don’t go to the pool to socialise, not once you get past the age of about ten. You go to the pool to swim or to keep the kids busy. And we just don’t have the hotpots like they do. My local pool – which is so freezing that I don’t go there unless I have to – has a jacuzzi attached to the kids’ pool but I don’t think it’s been open since I was a teenager and it’s certainly never been warm, let alone hot. It’s hard to gather an entire social group in a large pot of boiling hot water when we don’t have the hot water, the large pot or the social structure where people and their mates want to gather and gossip under the circumstances. Imagine if instead of Christmas At The Pub, we all got together at the pool once a year. Even among friends, do you want to be sitting there in a swimsuit? Without two or three bottles of wine?
I’m not a huge social person so it’s hard for me to have an opinion on how much I’d enjoy socialising in a hotpot. What I do know is how much I enjoy it personally. I love hot water. I don’t sit in the hotpots that take my skin off, the 40-42° pots and even up to 44° occasionally. I notice those pots tend to be filled with men. Is male skin more resistant to serious burns and scalding than female skin? But I do very happily sit in the pots that are around 38°. Very nice. Very warm. I could – and I do – sit in them for hours. It’s like being in a hot bath except that you’re sitting in the open air, listening to strangers chat in a language you don’t speak. But to sit and chat with your own social group? Or worse, work people? Also, I think that however much I love sitting in a hotpot, I’d eventually want to go and swim some lanes.
Icelanders definitely spend more time in the hotpots than they do in the actual pool. They swim – that’s why they build pools and not just hotpots – but there are twenty hotpotters for every swimmer. I don’t swim much – at least, I didn’t swim much last time I was in Iceland – but I swim a little and it’s amazing to swim in warm water. It’s not warm enough to be uncomfortable to swim in but it’s definitely warmer than the lukewarm municipal pool water you get here and so much warmer than the chilly water you get in outdoor pools here. Particularly after the early-May swims I’ve done so far this year, I’m fantasizing about wonderful warm outdoor water, with light tendrils of steam drifting up and maybe even some amazing views. What I would give to be swimming in the pool at Borgarnes! Even that small empty pool in Reykjahlíð while everyone else is at the Nature Baths. Of course, I’d pop over to the Nature Baths too.
There’s another thing about swimming in Iceland that I wanted to talk about and that’s the aforementioned Obligatory Naked Shower. Icelandic pools are filled with natural water, clean clear cold spring water heated by the smelly boiling water. To keep it clean and clear, they don’t use chlorine or any other chemical cleaning substance. They use reliance on people washing before they get in. And when I say “washing”, I mean that there are posters up in all changing rooms showing what parts of your body you should wash and in order to reach them, you must shower without swimsuit.
Now, I’m British. We don’t do public nudity. Brits and Americans “don’t see” the posters or they “don’t understand them” or they just plain ignore them. Icelanders don’t even blink and neither do a lot of mainland Europeans. But for your average English-speaking tourist, the idea of washing naked in front of strangers is something they won’t even imagine, let alone do. But it gets easier with practice and the best way to start is to go to a small quiet pool where you have the changing rooms to yourself. A naked shower alone is tolerable.
I don’t relish public nudity but once you’ve found yourself with no choice but to stand there and wash while a Dutch tourist on the same pool & Northern Lights tour insists on holding a conversation, you do get more comfortable with it and I think to a certain degree, it does have an effect on your body image and body positivity and all that. I guess if you’re hiding your body away because you can’t bear the idea of anyone seeing it, it’s going to do something to some part of your mind when you display the full thing in public, however reluctantly. When you realise this is a human body being washed just like all the other human bodies being washed, when you’re chatting to someone and they’re not listing your physical faults and probably not even noticing them and those little processes in the back of your brain start to whisper about how your body isn’t as bad as you’ve thought it was. Anyway, look at all the things it can do despite being the wrong shape here and the wrong texture there and does it really matter?
My body has changed shape and size during lockdown and quarantine and plaguetime, in a way that doesn’t entirely please me. It should be stronger and fitter but I’m not really noticing those things on the outside and although I’m not craving an Obligatory Public Naked Shower, I think it might be good for me to have all those processes refreshed and started again. I could get a similar effect with a certainly monthly adults-only swimming session on Tuesday evenings but I think I firmly – and perhaps wrongly – believe that those swimming sessions will be dominated by older men enjoying the opportunity to legally and proudly get their bits out and wave them around and the naked bodies will be front and centre rather than the irrelevant nothing that they are in Icelandic showers. It’ll be a totally different atmosphere and a totally different mental effect and overall, I’d rather not. Especially as I’ll have to see the same lifeguards twice a week every week and know what they saw.
So I’ll keep up my regular swimming, wait until the summer actually turns up and the pool gets warm but I’ll keep my clothes on and count down the days until I can go to Iceland again.