I Am a Polar Bear

By Sunday evening, I was supposed to be packing up to move to Poland after a quick weekend in Berlin. But I felt kind of unsatisfied, like I was missing something in Berlin. Well, I was – I would have liked to see Brandenburg Gate without all the fences and portacabins blocking my view. I should have gone up both the Reichstag dome and the TV tower. I would have liked to go to Charlottenburg. But was I missing anything I could easily remedy at 6pm on a Sunday? I searched for to-do lists in Berlin and found the usual suspects and then I came across something unexpected. It’s not going to make most people Must Do list but it caught my eye. It was a spa that also kind of functioned as a club by playing music through underwater speakers. When it’s not doing that, it’s because it’s got live music and DJ sets. Now, this was the “modern Berlin” of my previous post – the Berlin where everyone wears black and Dr Martens while living in warehouses and listening to techno. I like a spa and this seemed a particularly Berlin spa. I was a bit wary of how loud it would be and how busy – was I picturing the crowds on a dance floor only in warm water? Pretty much.

There were tickets available. I looked up how long it would take to get there (a straight run a few stops south on the U-Bahn right outside my hotel plus a 10-15 minute walk) and booked a ticket for just after that time.

Liquidrom felt like “Liquid-rom”, a room full of water, but I think it actually takes its name from Tempodrom, which is a live music venue in the same circus tent/crown-shaped building. “Liqui-drom”, like “Tempo-drom”, like a hippodrome or velodrome. Liquidrom is actually a fairly small place hiding almost underneath Tempodrom. You pay a deposit for entry, in advance in my case, and then when you leave, you pay off whatever’s on your electronic wristband – your entry fee, the cost for overstaying it, sauna entry, anything you buy at the bar, before handing the bracelet in and leaving. I was going to say that you use it to open the exit turnstile but no, you hand it in at reception.

Now, there are a couple of shocks. The first is mixed changing rooms with very little private changing space, which didn’t bother me quite as much as the fact that the bench where you put everything down while you change is in full view of the open door. You’re assigned a locker, you find it, fill it (maybe keep your towel with you), close it and press your wristband to the corner where a tiny light within the door will flash to tell you it’s locked. Quick shower and then out into the spa area.

The second shock will be less of a shock if you know a little about central European bathing practices. There’s a sauna area and it’s “textile-free”. That means you’re required to be naked in there. As a Brit, I’m horrified. As a regular Iceland visitor, I try to be less uncomfortable with it but what really cemented my decision to skip the sauna was that you have to sit on a towel. I only had one towel. If I sat on it in the sauna, it would be no use to dry myself with later. You scan your wristband and it adds €2.50 to your bill. Seems a good time to talk about pricing, actually. €22.50 for two hours, €30 for four, with €2.50 for every thirty minutes you overstay by. You can also hire robes and towels and slippers or book packages including them with your entry.

But the actual second shock is that you can choose to remain textile-free in the common areas of the spa, including the outdoor pool. This means no photos, obviously, which is why you don’t get to see the inside of the place I’m dedicating an entire post to. It also means the “oh, I wasn’t expecting to see that!” eye-dance on the way to the main pool, which fortunately is swimwear non-optional.

The main pool is a large round warm pool about chest-deep on me. It’s got a concrete domed ceiling over it but it’s underground, in a square room, giving the effect of an overgrown concrete Colman event shelter. It’s also not the most spa-like effect in the world that the corners are used for storage of things like cage trolleys and unidentifiable sacks of something that looks like flour. It’s got lights on two sides aimed at the water so they reflect on the domed ceiling and look like the visualisations on the free music players on mid-00s PCs.

What I wasn’t expecting was a forest of black and white foam pool noodles. It’s the done thing to take two or three so that you can float limply in the water with your ears submerged so you can hear the music. I don’t know how everyone else managed it but I found unless I curled a minimum of two fingers around the rail just below water level, I floated away and nothing will break your music and flotation-induced trance like some idiot crashing into you. Pool noodles are inherently a bit silly but they take on a certain class in black and white.

It was busy but not 2am nightclub dance floor busy. Just 7.30pm Sunday interesting spa concept busy. And it wasn’t too loud. Well, the music wasn’t. It did indeed seem designed to be heard underwater but not at obnoxious volume, not by a long way. You could hear it fairly quietly but perfectly well above water too but it was mostly drowned out by the incessant sloshing of water over the edge. Lots of pools do this, keep the water cycling by letting it permanently overfill, but the only place it’s ever been so deafening before this was in the tiny echoey 2-person sulphur bathroom in Chreli Abano in Tbilisi. A low-ceilinged room underground has a lot of echo.

The outdoor pool is completely enclosed by high walls on all four sides and glass walls on three sides into the Liquidrom complex, including one door directly from the sauna area. It’s just deep enough to sit in and six people can comfortably sit side-by-side along it with their feet on the opposite side. Comfortably until one of your textile-free pool-mates stands up to leave and you find yourself eye-level with the reason the world is mostly pro-textile. Fortunately most people choose to step straight out onto the pool’s decking rather than squeeze past to the two steps out. I sat here for a while, alternately trying to find something safe to look at and conducting some internal surveys of what I was seeing on all sides. I concluded that all the women were pretty much goddesses and the men… well, they’re the reason the world and I are so pro-textile. The outdoor pool was pleasant enough but I’d have liked it to be a lot bigger and even in the hot late July weather, a few degrees hotter. It should be a long hotpot and it’s not. Maybe even have two of them and make one textile- compulsory.

Yes, that’s a Brit being weird about it. Mainland and Northern Europeans are generally very chilled about public nudity. It’s just us Anglophones who don’t like it. Think Zhaan from Farscape: “Is nudity a taboo in your culture? Are you ashamed of your bodies?”. Well, mine isn’t the shape or size I’d like it to be but I don’t think I’m ashamed of it. I’m just not accustomed to displaying it publicly, nor to having others displayed publicly in my presence. It might have been a very good and healthy experience for me to have gone in the saunas but at the moment, I don’t regret being stopped by my lack of second towel.

I stayed just under two hours and left without an extension on my wristband, which I scanned at the computer by the door and paid off. I handed it back at reception and she checked it before waving me off and I walked down the still-pretty-light-for-gone-9pm streets to the U-Bahn. If I find myself in Berlin again in future, I’ll go again and I’ll take two towels so I can sit in one in the sauna, although only time and experience can tell whether I’ll be able to bring myself to be textile-free in public.