Finding your Sport

I first got into swimming when my suitemate at DePaul invited me to go with her. I said yes and we went every tuesday and thursday to this basement pool from the 60's or 70's with tan and brown tile on the walls. It was the underbelly of something. I tried to pick it up again at Smith but the pool hours were finicky (unlike at DePaul where the pool was open all the time) and this made it crowded and I've never enjoyed sharing lanes with more than another person. Eventually I gave it up and then when I moved to London I started going to the Peckham pool - in London you couldn't buy a monthly pass you had to pay for a membership and then pay again each time you used the facilities, moreover you paid more if you went on peak hours. The peak versus off peak hour thing drives me crazy but its common practice even at Yoga classes to pay more for peak hours.

After London I gave it up again until NYU where the swimming facilities were pretty great, music played in the background although it was a bit difficult to hear but it was something to tune into, and while it was a busy pool it never felt too crowded- although maybe I tended to frequent it on "Off-Peak" hours... It was a great respite in the summer when Manhattan turns into a concrete oven and relief is hard to come by. So after refusing on moral grounds to pay 20 dollars an hour for yoga, and bored by laps at our local track I decided to find a pool. It's 3 euro to go to any public pool in Paris and there were 3 in the 18e where we live, the first one Sylvain found for me online was located in a historical building used in the filming of Amelie. I decided against it after reading the reviews by other swimmers. The second I decided to give a go. It's really gray here these days, it looks more like London than some parts of London and the area this pool is in- about an 10 minute walk from our apartment reminds me of where I lived in Whitechapel.

I handed my 3 euro to the guy at reception and then in an anti-room with benches one removed their shoes. There was one door which inevitably led to the locker room- but only one? Did a second door lead to separate male and female locker rooms? I asked- no, there was just one. Bathrooms at Starbucks and restaurants were often unisex in France (or at least Paris) but sharing a locker room seemed a little strange to me. The locker room perimeter was all changing cubicles and the middle area were four rows of lockers, so actually it wasn't weird at all, it just took out the leisurely naked aspect of locker rooms. So I changed and headed to the shower area where on one side were toilets which I'm guessing no one ever used. It was all sort of wet in this room because of the showers and there were neither toilet seats or toilet paper. So I took my shower and headed to the pool- between the shower room and the pool room was a cesspool of sorts where the floor dipped about 8 inches for about 3 feet now collected with nasty water. The pool was sort of 80's looking but generally nice, 4 or 5 lanes for swimming and I shared with two men; one wall was all window which looked out to a blue sky and a track and soccer fields. In France speedos are required for health and sanitary reasons- I've been told because the kind of men's trunks Americans often wear may also be used in everyday life as shorts and someone may have worn them riding on the bus and picked up some germs. I figure, whatever, who cares, thats why public pools are laden with chemicals, but apparently the French do.

I went back on Friday and when I entered the building I was hit forcefully with the unmistakable smell of pot smoke. It wasn't like when you faintly smell beer on some closet alcoholic at work, it was like the basement from that 70's show. The man at reception seemed not to notice his working space had become a weed den, and while I don't necessarily have a problem with marijuana smoking, it did seem odd to be present at a sort of YMCA space.