I Am A Polar Bear

On Monday, I talked about the best swimming pools in Reykjavik and today I’m going to go over how you actually use a local swimming pool in Iceland. When you arrive, they’ll ask “have you been here before?” and even if you say you have, they’ll still ask “So you know all the rules?”. If you don’t know the rules, let me explain the whole process.

Arrive

So you’ll arrive, you’ll ask to swim and hand over somewhere in the region of £8. Depending on the pool, you’ll now either be given an electronic wristband or a piece of receipt paper with a barcode on it or both. You’ll need one of them to get through the turnstile and if you’ve got both, it’ll be the barcode. Scan it, go through the code, follow the signs to the appropriate changing rooms.

Let’s skip ahead here – you will find yourself naked in public at some point in this process. Iceland doesn’t believe in private changing cubicles but you may find a single shower behind a curtain for privacy. What I’m getting at here is that those of you who don’t fit neatly into the expected male/female binary are going to have to choose which of the two changing rooms is most suitable for you personally.

Back to the changing rooms. There are shelves outside and these are for your shoes. Iceland is often wet, slushy, muddy or you’ll be ankle-deep in anti-slip grit. In Icelandic homes, people take their shoes off at the door but it’s impractical to require tourists to take off shoes when they go into shops, restaurants or hotels (although I had to do it in my guesthouse!). Here, you’re going to take them off anyway, so you’re going to take them off before you track filth all over the changing rooms! Your shoes will be perfectly safe here. Some pools provide mini lockers if you’re concerned about your shoes or if you have a plastic bag, you can carry them in and put them in your locker. Don’t just put them in your locker, because then you’re just putting the filth directly where people put their clothes.

It’s very rare these days to find a locker that requires a coin to lock it. In the last few years, the front desk started giving out tokens but nowadays, it’s either an electronic bracelet, a key on an elastic band or a PIN code. Pick a locker, any locker. If you’ve got a bracelet, you usually just press your bracelet against the lock until it makes a noise and the light changes colour. If you’re at the Blue Lagoon, where all these rules apply too, there will be one lock panel in the middle of a bank or four or six or even eight lockers. Close your locker and press your bracelet to the nearest lock panel. It knows which locker has just closed and it will lock it, register it to that particular wristband and flash up the locker number just to be sure. Same when it comes to unlocking – touch it to the panel, it’ll recognise “Oh, this wristband opens locker 56” and the locker will pop open. Local pools will have a lock on every individual locker.

Take out your swimwear, towel, goggles, shampoo, whatever you want in the shower afterwards. Take off your clothes, put everything in the locker and lock it. Notice I didn’t say “put on your swimwear”. Sorry, this is Iceland.

The shower

Iceland uses clean spring water for its pools. You might occasionally come across a brimstone-scented fresh-from-the-local-borehole pool but most of them use clean water heated by the smelly water in a heat exchanger. Iceland doesn’t believe in putting chemical disinfectants in its pools; it relies on swimmers already being clean, so one of the rules is to take a shower before you go in.

Put everything you don’t need in the pool – ie towel, shampoo etc – in the little rack you inevitably find somewhere near the shower (except at most of the ten spas: at the big ones, there just isn’t anywhere to leave those things because it’s too busy and at some of them, you grab one of their towels on the way back to the changing rooms). Take your swimwear and go to the showers. There will be a poster on the wall showing a human figure with certain areas circled in red – head, armpits, crotch, feet. Wash these areas without swimsuit and using soap. Don’t worry, Iceland will provide the soap. They’re not going to give you any excuse to skip the compulsory shower, like “I forgot my shower gel, oh well, I’ll just go filthy into the nice clean water”. I start at the top and work my way down to be sure I don’t forget any areas by skipping randomly around. This will feel very awkward and uncomfortable. The English-speaking world is not given to public nudity. British, American and Canadian tourists in particular will do their best to get out of the compulsory shower. “Oh, I didn’t see the sign”, “Oh, I didn’t know”, “Oh, I forgot” etc. Do it. You’re filthy. Even if you showered when you got up, you’ve got dressed and been out and about in public since then. Wash. If I can do it, you can do it. You can keep facing the wall, pretend no one else is there, eyes glued to the floor. But honestly, you don’t need to worry. No one’s judging your body in there – or if they are, they’re polite enough to not say it or let their faces say it for them. They’re just getting on with their own shower and getting out of there. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing to get a glimpse of actual human bodies going about in real life occasionally, just to remind you that what you see on TV, in movies, in magazines etc is not typical of your everyday ordinary non-millionnaire person.

Now you can get dressed! In fact, it’s compulsory – Iceland demands nudity in the showers but condemns it elsewhere.

In the pool

There are no particular rules to follow in the pool, other than the usual. Don’t run because you might slip and injure yourself, don’t dive into shallow water and shatter your spine, don’t do anything that’s illegal in public etc. If you’ve been to the spas, you may not realise that photos are absolutely forbidden in ordinary swimming pools. I have no idea why but they’re very strict about it, so don’t think you’re going to get away with taking your phone into the hot tub. A book, yes. It always astonishes me to see actual paperback books in pools. Some people have pool shoes for walking from the changing rooms or between hotpots but they’re not required. Given the unpredictability of the Icelandic weather, I’d leave my towel in the rack in the changing room but if you particularly want it handy, there’s no real reason not to bring it outside, if you can find somewhere dry to leave it. Spas usually have hooks around the place but public pools don’t – they expect you to leave your towel in the shower room.

Afterwards

Most people will shower naked again after their swim but there’s no requirement this time – it’s up to you if you want to get back into your clothes before you’re perfectly clean in every nook and cranny. It’s just a habit, I think.

The rule here is that you will dry yourself thoroughly before returning to the changing rooms. Changing rooms are for changing, they’re not for drying. Some pools will have an attendant and an attendant will think nothing of yelling at the tourist who drips in the nice dry changing area, and if they don’t yell, they’ll quite pointedly follow you with a mop or squeegee, giving you A Look. This means swimwear off again before returning to the changing room but at least you’ve got your towel handy this time.

If you’ve brought your shoes into your locker with you, carry them outside in their plastic bag before putting them back on. Changing rooms are a shoe-free zone. If you’ve left them on the shelves, go outside and put them on.

You won’t need your barcode to get through the turnstile to leave but if you’ve got an electronic bracelet, you might need to put it in a hole to get the turnstile to open, or into a box immediately outside it. Please do this, otherwise the pool runs low on bracelets very quickly.

And that’s it! You’ve survived your first swim at an Icelandic pool and you now know the answers when you’re asked “Have you been here before? So you know all the rules?”.