My parents love Berlin but it’s never appealed. That’s more a lack of a positive feeling than the presence of a negative one. I knew I’d get there one day but it wasn’t sitting there glowing, going “gotta see me, come see me” like some places do. But when I planned my train trip from London to Warsaw, this was the suggested route and it made enough sense that I didn’t go out of my way to plan to get around it. I went out on Saturday morning and dutifully saw the sights. Brandenburg Gate was mostly hidden under some festival, the Reichstag Building’s famous dome isn’t nearly as big or visible as I expected, Checkpoint Charlie is mobbed with tourists who don’t understand that it’s in the middle of a functioning road in a major city and also, it was hot and sticky, which are precisely the conditions I wilt under.
But I found a way to cool off and that was an outdoor pool. I’d been hoping for something of the kind, because I do like to go for a swim if I can, and if there’s some interesting water-based experience to be had, I’m having it. In this case, it was an outdoor pool floating in the river.
It’s just a little way out of the very city centre but not far enough out that I can call it the suburbs. Zone 2 in London, probably. South-east just-out-of-centre, not far from Warschauer Straße station or Ostkreuz. I took the U-Bahn to Schlesisches Tor and then you can either walk the fifteen minutes to Badeschiff or take a bus two stops and walk the last five minutes. I did the latter because I was tired and my feet hurt and it was hot.
Now, I have two visions of Berlin, neither of which are the real one. The first is the one my parents see, a city full of important and historical sights, where you go from Brandenburg Gate to the Reichstag Building to Checkpoint Charlie to a boat trip and you eat a pretzel and a currywurst and that is Berlin. The second is one that I suspect is seen through younger eyes, which is a kind of cool, alternative Berlin, where everyone dresses in black and Dr Martens and everything is in converted warehouses and all the music is techno. Berlin as Shoreditch. Well, this kind of felt closer to that second Berlin. You walk through warehouses, down the mouth of a canal lined with small clubs and noisy riverside cafes, turn through some more warehouses and then you find a wooden gate between warehouses and Badeschiff is behind this.
It’s an outdoor pool but it’s also kind of a beach club. When you book your two-hour slot, it’s not for access to the pool, it’s really for access to the entire club. I’d got there over an hour early because I was hot and tired and I figured there was a bar there and I could sit and cool down and have a drink. But instead, they didn’t want to let me through the gate yet. I said “Oh… I thought there was a bar and I’d just sit and have a drink while I waited” and you could see the Euro signs flash in their eyes. Ok, if I was going to the bar I could go in. They’d come and scan my ticket when it was time. So I went to the bar, I got my large cold Coke in a glass bottle and I went to find a seat in the shade. Not that it was very sunny but it was hot and bright despite the clouds and I preferred to be in the shade.
I knew there was a pool and I knew there was a bar but the presence of sand and deckchairs and Instagram-friendly swings was a surprise. The furniture, where it wasn’t folding canvas and matchsticks, was made of palettes and warehouses formed the walls of the place. It was quite the difference from the heart of the city – a riverside beach club! Here was a bar where I could sit out in the fresh air and even take my sandals off without feeling weird and just chill for an hour.
My ticket was scanned and it was time to get changed. There are some tiny changing rooms built onto the side of the warehouse and some lockers built into the side of the changing rooms. I changed, I put my stuff in my locker – bring your own padlock. I’d known that before I’d left home so I had one with me but you can hire one from the bar or if you’re not there solo, you can just leave your clothes with the rest of your group. Now I could walk down to the pool.
There was more to the place than I’d realised. There’s an entire riverside terrace and then there’s decking down on the river itself, with rows and rows of deckchairs. Finally, there’s a pontoon with a lifeguard and cold showers and then you climb down and into the Badeschiff itself.
The Badeschiff, the bathing ship, was once a barge. It was converted into a swimming pool by cutting it off a metre or so above the waterline, lining it with a proper pool lining and all the necessary lights and filtration and then filling it with clean water. The river itself is too polluted to swim in, as most are these days, but you can swim in a boat floating in the river. I said earlier two-hour slots. You can book as many of these back-to-back as you like but the lifeguard takes a break for half an hour between slots and you have to vacate the pool during that time. I have to say, he’s a very attentive lifeguard. You are not going to miss your pre-pool shower while he’s there and no one is going to sit on the rim of the pool for longer than ten seconds before he notices and gestures you back into the water.
The handwritten sign on the jetty says the water is 24°. Coldest 24° I’ve ever encountered. You climb down the ladder into the water. The first step overhangs, so this is a bit of an ordeal and I don’t know whether it was the angle or the light or my sunglasses but once I was on the first step, I couldn’t tell how far down the water was. Was it an inch below me or six feet? I couldn’t tell. No, it was a few inches. I got onto the second step and my feet were in the water and it was freezing. For a moment, I just hung there. I’d waited over an hour for this and now it was too cold and I was going to get out and go home already?
No. I went down as far as I could bear but I couldn’t, in freezing-cold blood, just let go and half-jump the last bit into the water. My body doesn’t react well to cold water. I can get used to it if I have the chance but to just drop in would be to drown. So I hung onto the underneath of the jetty and swung underneath like on monkey bars onto the ledge around the edge of the pool. The pool is over 2m deep throughout so there are ledges all the way around. On the long sides, it’s a relatively narrow ledge. Wide enough to sit on, so swinging onto it and sitting there getting used to the water was fine. On the short ends, the ledges are wide enough to lie and sunbathe on. Once I was used to the water, I shuffled along my ledge to the sunbathing platform and sat there with my legs hanging over the edge into the deep water. Just a little bit forward. You’re mostly wet, it won’t take much to actually end up in the water. And at last I shuffled forwards and in and swam like a scared dog to the other end. But by then I was getting used to the water. It’s cool but once you’re actually in, it’s less of a shock. I looked back at the ladders. Getting out of the water might be an adventure.
I’m half-heartedly trying to do my Rebel Swimmer badge this summer. The main difficulty with that is 24 swims in three months so I wanted to count this as “a swim”. It’s self-assessed so it’s up to you what you count as a swim but I figured I probably had to actually swim rather than sit in the water on the ledges. Ten lengths. That’s a swim. Ok, twenty lengths maybe. That’s definitely a swim. And then I sat on the end and did some calculations. I’d seen mention of this pool being 30-something metres long. 33? 32? 35? I decided to go with 32, partly because that seemed an easier number to do mental maths with and partly because if the pool was longer, I was winning whereas if it was shorter, I was missing out. Ten lengths at 32m is 320m. Therefore 20 lengths is 640m. 30 lengths is 960m. That only leaves 40m to a kilometre and forty metres is less than there and back again. Therefore it’s 32 lengths to a kilometre and that absolutely is a decent swim. I doubt anyone’s ever deliberately swum a kilometre in this pool. It’s for cooling off and posing and enjoying the novelty, not for training. So I swam my 32 lengths. It’s a bit tricky because it’s a long narrow pool with a lot of people in it, none of whom are really anticipating a length swimmer among them. I did notice that hardly anyone stayed in the pool longer than about twenty minutes. It’s a novelty for a dip but they’re really here to drink and sunbathe and read back on the terraces.
I actually didn’t stay there long either. I did my 32 lengths with lots of gaps between them and then I got out. If I stayed, I’d find myself trying to calculate a mile or I’d sit and get cold or I’d worry about climbing out. I’d cooled down, I’d had a good swim, I’d enjoyed the novelty of something that simultaneously felt very Berlin and also completely out of the ordinary and I was satisfied to walk back to the bus stop and go home and be lazy for the evening. And that’s what I did. I went home and had a proper shower to wash my hair, because washing in those freezing showers on the jetty wasn’t an option – and honestly, neither was washing a load of shampoo directly into the river below.
I will talk more about “proper sightseeing” in Berlin but I think the Badeschiff deserves its own post. If you’re in Berlin and you want to do something a bit unusual, I do think you should go to Badeschiff.