At the pool

[hrafntinna]

I love my pool. It's always full of artists and homosexuals and academics.

I always run across Magga Stina, former something or other of the Sugarcubes and popstar in her own right in the locker room. I always think: there's a good example of the punked-out autre Icelandic style, and then I realize RIGHT! It's Magga Stína.

I keep seeing this

Comments

[ewigweibliche]

Hot tubs. I have two such opportunities awaiting me. One to the Kabuki spa in SF, courtesy of my coworker. Adam and I are going to stay at Sadie & Nowell's Cole Valley house one weekend while they are out of town and I'm going to spend all of a Friday at the spa and pretend I'm rich and living in the City!

We also got, from the New Girl, a certificate for two for a hot tub at Piedmont Springs. So great!

One question for you: are all the Icelandic baths nude? Or, do the coed bath require swimsuits?

[hrafntinna]

None of the Icelandic hot tubs are nude, and all of them are coed. They aren't baths per se. They are a part of public pool culture. The same goes for the steam rooms. The saunas at Vesturbæjarlaug are single-sex (bathing suits in saunas are revolting).

One's hot tub at the private summer house may be both coed and nude, but that's the family. The cities and towns have stricter nudity taboos than in the Great Outdoors, where a cabin for hikers will have a communal sleeping room where people will change their clothes while getting ready for bed, and a flash of skin isn't a huge big deal.

The rules are looser than in the US. Small children attending the pools will follow the parent of either sex into the showers, though in practice more boys are in the women's showers than girls in the men's. Little boys thus have a very good idea of what real female bodies look like at all ages. Maybe not such a bad thing.