If you’re going to swim in a delightful outdoors naturally heated geothermal pool in Iceland, you’re going to have to face the dreaded Obligatory Naked Shower.
Icelandic pool water comes straight from the ground. They don’t put chlorine in it or any other chemical disinfectant. The way Icelandic pools remain clean is to demand that bathers are clean when they get in and that means showering without swimsuit and washing, with the provided soap, all the places marked on the poster. This is usually in a communal shower; a row of shower heads protruding from a tiled wall where you’re expected to stand naked two feet from a naked stranger and touch all your dirty bits.
Icelanders and mainland Europeans are fine with this. It’s the Brits and the Americans who pretend they didn’t see the poster or didn’t understand it. My beloved countryfolk, we are dirtying the wonderful waters of Iceland. Please shower and do the wash, even if you have to do it clothed but… you know, reaching within.
Public nudity, even for our repressed body-taboo nation, gets easier with practice. In fact, I think it brings a kind of body positivity, or perhaps body neutrality, where you eventually realise that no one has glanced your way, no one has judged your imperfect shape or size and that you’ve stood naked in public and got away with it. It’s that bit easier to believe in the lizardy part of your brain that your flesh prison is ok if you’ve displayed it to a changing room of utterly indifferent people.
But…
I haven’t displayed my imperfect flesh prison in a communal shower in nearly four years. If you don’t use it, you lose it, like languages, and I’ve definitely lost my casual indifference to this awkward ritual. Worse, this flesh prison isn’t the size or shape it was last time I was here. I’ve survived a pandemic and two years of working from home, with ready access to snacks, since then. Maybe I was ok with this ritual in 2018. But now, in 2022, to expose this post-pandemic flesh while out of practice in the art of exposing?
On the other hand, this body gets more exercise now than it ever used to. I’ve walked at least two kilometres every single day since May 1st 2020. When the local outdoor pool is open in the summer, I swim a mile twice a week. Surely that’s had some external effect on my flesh prison? Or at least in my mental attitude towards it?
And so here I was, with my swimsuit and towel in one hand and my locker key in the other…
I went straight from the plane to my apartment to the pool. Even given the ludicrously long wait for my luggage and the fact that it’s nearly an hour into town from the airport, I’d only had my feet on Icelandic soil for a little over two hours before I was in that public shower.
And it was fine.
It remains slightly awkward but it turns out you don’t lose it. It’s like the moment you jump off the bungee platform – you just take off the towel, shove it in the rack and go for it. By the time you’ve switched on the water – which is the point where the water on your head makes you think if you can’t see them, they can’t see you – you’ve already passed the point of “I can’t display this to the entire shower room!”.
That’s the bit where some part of me goes all “I’m not like other girls”. I’m not a regular tourist, I’m a cool tourist. I can be just as naked as an Icelander. Look at how cowardly my fellow countryfolk are. I’m not like them. I’m so cool with this that I’m practically a Scandinavian.
Then I see a golden-bronze beauty standing in front of the changing room mirror prioritising a full face of immaculate makeup over any fabric at all and I realise I’m wearing a towel and trying to get dressed around it while keeping my back to as many people as possible and I’m reminded that I’m more British than I like to think.
But at least I’m not so British that I skip the ritual and go in the pool dirty!
No one’s really looking and no one really cares. Most people are like me, preoccupied with getting this done as quickly as possible and without making eye contact. The beautiful but judgey ones are preoccupied with trying to make everyone else look at them covetously. “It’s just a body,” as my grandad once said (although he was talking about what to do with it after he died, not about being naked in public. He was of the generation that wore a suit and tie to the beach).
It’s just a body.
Yeah. It’s got two legs, with grubby feet that need a wash on the ends. It’s got two arms. A head. A torso that keeps all the parts joined together. A waterproof covering. There’s half a dozen others of them being washed before a swim. None of them match and no one cares. We’re snowflakes: we’re all different and we’re all cold, or we’re about to be because this isn’t the ideal weather to scurry outside scantily clad and wet to get to the warm water.
I practiced this ritual every single day I was in Iceland (ok, the Blue and Sky Lagoons provide private cubicles because they know their target tourist market) and the balance remains in the same place, somewhere between “bit awkward” and “I can 100% do this”.