This is the fourth post of the Frankfurt series and I think this is the first time I’m taking you into actual city centre Frankfurt! It’s winter, it’s cold, I’ve done the market a couple of times and I’m tired. So where do I? I go for a swim!
I like swimming. I like wallowing in warm water, that is. I won’t claim I always swim. I didn’t this time – the lane pool looked chilly. But when it’s really cold outside and you’ve already been to the Christmas market three times, finding a pool is always a fun thing to do. Germany actually seems to have a surprising amount of natural hot spring water and as I’ve already said, there are thermal springs just 40km away in Wiesbaden. I’m not sure Frankfurt itself has much in the way of natural spring water but it does have its share of pools and the one I opted for is Titus Thermen, which is more of an adventure pool than a swimming one.
It’s a tiny bit of a trek from the city centre. I took the 16 tram to its northern terminus at Ginnheim, then either the U1 or U9 metro three stops north to Northwestzentrum. You can also take the U1 pretty much its entire length from Willy-Brant-Platz but that train is quite busy and it feels like a much longer journey. Northwestzentrum is a shopping centre and the first time I’d realised how much of a smoking problem Germany has. You can smoke inside! There are designated smoking areas on indoor train platforms but no one really blinks if you smoke outside them. Or inside covered shopping centres, apparently. Germany, I thought you were supposed to be ahead of the rest of us. We banned this sort of thing nearly twenty years ago.
Anyway. Go up two escalators and head outside and Titus Thermen is on the opposite corner of the little square. What you don’t realise if you arrived by rail is that behind the Therme, there’s four lanes of traffic. You can’t see it from here and you certainly can’t see it from inside the spa, despite the huge spaceship-style banks of windows.
You pay for a 90 minute session and that timer starts counting from the minute you scan your entry card on the turnstile. As at Thermalbad Aukammtal, the changing cabins are double-doored, with one door leading to the outside world and the other leading to the lockers, for which you’ll need a €2 coin. In case you don’t remember coin-operated pool lockers, this gets returned to you when you open the locker and that means you can go back as many times as you need. Then the banks of lockers lead you towards the pool. No need for random men to point me in the right direction here – and again, yes, it’s mixed changing and lockers. There are individual showers in tiny rooms just inside the locker room but in the little lobby between pool and locker room, there are male and female shower rooms, so they’re not actually expecting the entire pool to use just the two private showers, as I concluded the first time I came.
And so to the pool!
There are three pools. The first one is the lane pool which also has a roped-off area for diving from a one-metre board. The second is what I call the activity pool. It has bubble benches, a fountain, a maelstrom and a kind of circular lazy river. The various bubbling and moving things work in circuits, in three sets lasting ten or fifteen minutes each. Then the third pool is half-hidden. It has a weird steel-plated bottom, a slide that comes down into the side and a cave hidden away at the back, where lifeguards have to watch over you via cameras.
Besides the pools, there’s a large bubble pool and two hot pots. Now, because of everything that’s going on, they’re saving money by turning air and water temperature down by two degrees. I’d like it a bit warmer, especially in winter when you arrive with your legs half-frozen but it’s not unpleasantly cold. But the large bubble pool is, and that’s the first thing you encounter when you walk out into the pool area. I went twice and never once did I see anyone in that pool. The hot pots are a nice temperature, though.
There are a couple of fun details. The first is that the pools are lit underwater by pinkish lights which make everything look purple. It’s very odd to sit in a purple hot pot or wallow in a purple pool.
The second is that someone apparently decided to make this look like an oasis in the jungle. There are trees growing up to the high glass ceiling and around the adjoining cafe and between the two fun pools there are pillars and arches. Some of them have “‘collapsed” and are used as benches (there’s no “‘collapsed” about it: this is 100% contrived. They’ve been cut deliberately as seating and they’re not even real pillars) and some of them are just broken finnials. There are weird Roman-style statues. And yet, the whole place is also full of fairly clinical white tiles and steel floors. It can’t quite figure out what it is.
Oh, it was nice! I sat on the bubble benches until my muscles turned to jelly and I went in one of the maelstrom corners and got pummelled. I’m not exactly going to say I needed forcible relaxation – I’d come straight to Germany from my winter wellness glamping weekend, which is two holidays separated by about fourteen hours – but November and the beginning of December were busy and a flying day is stressful and so it felt so good to just get in the pool and allow jets to massage me into next week.
Perhaps it wasn’t so relaxing to drift around trying to mentally plan my 2023 blog series – the theme of that will be a surprise on the first Monday of the new year. Can’t quite turn off my brain. I got back home 23 hours ago as I write this and I’ve got the last five Blogmas posts, the ones about Germany, to write from scratch before Saturday afternoon, so I’ve still got a few days before I can really relax. But one is already published and I think there’s only one left to finish writing so I’m sure it’ll be fine. Anyway, I’m in a lovely warm bubbly bath with my tablet in a waterproof case so I’m doing the warm water/blog combo again.
Ok, Titus Thermen is all a bit ridiculous and it’s not as warm as it could be but it’s a fun place to spend an afternoon when the weather is too bad to do anything that might keep you outside getting soaked or frozen, or for when you’re in the mood for some warm water or some forcible relaxation. I’m pretty sure you can finish off the job by adding a sauna session to your swim and I bet that would be nice.