Nudity is a privelage, not a right!

I don't usually swim on weekends. Weekends are for long efforts and rest. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at the geriatrics hour is my usual pool time. But today, uncharicteristically, Silvia and I went to the pool.

I wasn't really feeling a tough workout, so I planned to do a workout that my college swim coach taught us, called roulette. If you're in the kind of mood I was in today, it's more like Russian roulette. Here's how it goes, first you write the numbers 0-9 on a piece of paper, then you put a different set next to each number like this:
0. 300 25fast/25easy/50f/50e/75f/75e
1. 3x200 descending
2. 6x25 sprint
3. 3x100 IM
4. 300 catch-up
5. 100 kick
6. 400 pull
7. 300 25 right arm/25 left arm/50 swim
8. 1000 straight
9. 200 IM with fins (dolphin kick on breast)
Then you take your handy-dandy stopwatch and start then stop it. The number that's in the 100ths of a second spot (the one that there's no way that you can rig it) is the set that you do above. For example, if you stop after 2.48 seconds, you do #8, 1000 straight. It's a fun way to mix up a bunch of different kinds of workouts. Anyway, my workout is beside the point...

On a sunny Sunday afternoon in late June I was expecting to see a different crowd than the granny soup that I usually swim around in. We tried to go around lunch time to avoid the families with CHILDREN so I could at least pretend that the pool wasn't filled with pee. No such luck though. There were kids everywhere, doing belly flops off the blocks, whacking eachother with noodles, and hanging off lane lines. "Pedro!" a little girl kept yelling as she hucked a kickboard at her brother's head.

The Sunday afternoon crowd had different screwballs than I was used to. One woman in the lane next to me was doing yoga at the bottom of the pool. When she got out a man took her place who was SO hairy I wondered if since bathing caps are mandatory in this pool, it was okay to make him wear a wetsuit.

There were also several women in bikinis that I couldn't tell if they were 4 months pregnant or just too fat to be wearing a bikini. There were several men in speedos with the same problem.

... And of course there were the sun bathers, inanimate people laid out on lounge chairs cooking in the sun like so many rows of kebabs on the grill...

As we were staking out a spot to leave our stuff we had to step over a particularly attractive girl lying face-up wearing nothing but a itty bitty, teeny weeny bikini bottom. She didn't have that bad a rack. "Are you allowed to do that?" I said to Silvia. "I mean, I understand on the beach - sorta - but here?" And then, there, on the other side of the pool, was a veritable panorama of horrible, naked tits! Several of the (possibly?) expectant mothers had their shapeless boobs flouncing to each side, falling where they may as the women did their best impressions of chalk outlines. And then, at the far end of the group, the Queen Beastly Breast of the bunch, a woman in her mid-sixties with enormous tits hanging close to her hip bones, wearing only what looked like a men's speedo bottom, crouching and squtting in the corner with her ass to her audience searching for something in her bag.

What is it about European women? The second they see water and a place to lie down, OFF goes the top. And the older or more overweight they are, the less they can control themselves. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of pride in one's body and all that, but come on!!! There are children about! It's not about shame, it's about modesty. If you've got it, flaunt it. But if you ain't got it, please don't get revenge by flaunting it anyway. Thank you.