Deep end boys and west end girls

Uch you know, just a wee young thing I picked up after my new hairdo.

If you listen to a lot of the young 'un's over in the Eastern parts of this city, you'll hear a load of crap. The West is boring; nothing happens there; it's not cool; blah, blah, blah. And, it's not true. Well it's not all true. Admittedly, we enjoy a somewhat more sedate pace of life compared to Warschauerstrasse on a Thursday night, but that's only because we're all indoors smoothing the pelt on our mink coats with our daughter's Barbie hairbrushes. Come the weekend, we're ready to party.

As if further evidence were required to prove how awesome the west side of Berlin is, I took my camera with me today to my new not-quite-favourite-but-heck-I-used-to-hate-these-places-place, Stadtbad Schoeneberg. In other words: a swimming pool. I know. If you ever read this post, or it's friend, this post, you'll realise just how great this place is for me to actually like it. But wait for this: I even went there today on my own account. NO FORCING REQUIRED!

So why the sudden change of heart? Well, for starters, it's clean! Bowl me over with a verruca sock! The changing rooms are clean and pleasant. You have to take your shoes and socks off in a little room before you go through to the changing rooms which eliminates that skanky, mucky wet that you normally find in changing rooms. The changing rooms are a vision of modern frosted glass and large slate tiles. And for the delight of youngsters, inside the cubicles there is a release handle which opens the doors on either side of the cubicle revealing their mother's semi-nude shouting body. (Of course, if I was German, I'd be mingling in the shared changing room, but I would struggle to gag Hamish's loud observations on other people's bodyparts while nonchalantly uncovering mine). 

Anyway, on to the pool. In the kids area, which you can see below in a photo I grabbed off the Tagesspiegel, you have a bunch of pools. Off to the far left (out of frame) there are loungers beside a very shallow pool for tiny people. When I was there with Stevie, he loved this pool, which he described as being "as cosy as warm piss". Which given the average age of the clientele in that particular part of the building, it probably was.

Beside, and the main pool below, you have a kind of jacuzzi section going on bottom left, a slide, one of those fountain things, and if you go under the bridge, you can go outside to a LAZY RIVER!! Seriously. I was sold at the cleanliness, but I fell in love with the lazy river. Back indoors, there's also a flume. Notoriously quick to crap myself at the sight of these sorts of things, I must of been in a shocked-by-wonderment-daze, because even I went on it....more than once.

Photo from Der Tagesspiegel copyright: Kitty Kleist Heinrich

There is also a proper grown-ups pool with diving boards in a separate area, and even it has a pool to the side of it for non-swimmers. This is the pool that features in my photo at the top, because way down at the deep end there's a window where underwater swimmers can wave out at the voyeurs with kids and cameras in the reception area, or alternatively the unsuspecting can get an eyeful of folk's bums and wobbly thighs trembling through the water. Like I say, AWESOME!

Anyway, I like this place, so if at all possible if you're in the area and fancy a swim, could you go somewhere a little further east? It's really cool over that side of the city, and all the floating plasters feature post-modern grafitti for the delight of local hipsters and tourists alike. Promise.

http://www.berlinerbaederbetriebe.de/105.html