French Pools Are Ridiculous

Yesterday Jessica and I thought we’d have a nice, easy day and just relax at a public pool. We went to the Josephine Baker pool in the Bercy area. Absolutely nothing about the pool was what we expected.

First of all, we were under the impression that the pool would be free. It was not. It ended up being 13€ for the both of us for just two hours. The ladies at the front desk  claimed to not know much English, but knew enough to inform (threaten) us that if we were just two minutes over our two hours we would be charged for another hour.

Immediately after buying said over priced tickets, we were now informed that swim caps were obligatory to actually go into the pool. To be fair, they did mention this before but Jessica and I were too focused on the price to understand that. We obviously did not have swim caps, so we paid 5€ each for them at the front desk.

I’ll have more on this torture device later, but now it was time for us to actually go in. To get into the changing room area, they give you a card and you have to scan it at a turnstyle like you would for the metro. Once you’re through you have to take your shoes off and walk through a mini foot-pool to get into the changing room. The water had lots of dirt and who knows what else but was apparently ‘hygienic.’ We were finally in the changing/locker room, which was co-ed.

We found a locker that looked open with a key on the outside. We proceeded to start putting on sunscreen, etc. when a worker came over and kept telling us something in French. We eventually figured out she was telling us we had to shower off before gong into the pool area and she was probably perplexed about why we we were putting sunscreen on just to wash it off immediately. So we did that. Came back to the locker, got our swim caps out, and were ready to go. We struggled to actually lock our locker for awhile and the worker came back and told us we had to insert a euro in for it to work.  We found out on the way back in, that it returns the euro once you open the locker. What is the point of that, you ask? To be ridiculous.

We finally go outside. You have to walk through another foot pool to go out into the swim/lounge area. It’s time now for us to put on our swim caps. We struggle with this for at least ten minutes. People around us are laughing, we had to watch how someone put theirs on, it was very stressful. We finally get them mostly on, they hurt. We go into the pool, there’s really no space for just splashing around. Only 4 lanes cordoned off. The lane on the edge of the pool seems to be where the less serious swimmers are.  That where we went, it was by far the most crowded lane in the pool.

The actual swimming was fine. They had 3 lifeguards on duty, all of them sitting right next to each other on one side of the pool and not even pretending to be watching. We stay in the pool for about an hour, then went upstairs to the lounge area to dry off since we didn’t bring towels.

Our two hours were almost up so we went back down, through the foot pool and back into the locker room. All I have to say about all these supposed ‘hygienic’ rules is that they did absolutely nothing and just made the experience worse.  The floor in the locker room was soaking wet from all the foot pools and there was dirt every were, because the foot pools don’t do anything!! I made the mistake of going to the bathroom while we were there – no shoes, because that’s not allowed – and there was a giant puddle of water near the toilets that you had to stand in. Disgusting.  And if the swim caps were for hygiene, they did jack squat since everyone’s hair still got wet and in the pool because swim caps suck and don’t ever stay on properly.

In conclusion, ridiculous.