Sunday morning once again, and I arrived at the municipal swimming pool at 8:15 am (the pool opens on Sunday morning at 8) only to face a dull, grey and unlit building. On strike again! OK. Call another pool with cell phone. OK, they’re open. Go to bus stop. Stop! There was Anne, another pool regular coming toward me. “Ils sont en grève” (they’re on strike) I warned her. Anne swims regularly at our pool, and we always greet each other in the shower room. “OK,” she said. “Allons nous à Mathis” (OK – let’s go to Mathis). Huh? Mathis is supposedly one of the best municipal pools in the area– at least that’s what several “regulars” have told me. Frankly, I’d never been there and didn’t even know exactly where it was located. What I did know was that it wasn’t exactly nearby – but here was Anne suggesting we walk there! As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen a lot of Anne at our pool recently. She explained this was because she now goes more frequently to Mathis. How could I resist? “Je suis partante” (I’m game!). And off we went, sacs balanced on shoulders to the mysterious Mathis pool. And I was right, it wasn’t that close.
After we crossed over the railroad tracks that lead to the Gare de l’Est, we turned into a small park with gigantic clean lined apartment towers – social housing as a matter of fact. This finally led to the pool, which was of course open and not on strike. I think they just don’t do a thing like that at Mathis. Thanks to my guide Anne, I had finally arrived at the “best” pool. But now there was one more hurdle to overcome. Each pool has it’s own unique system for changing booths and lockers. At Hebert, the ‘hood pool, you get a basket, undress in a changing booth, put the basket with your things into a locker and then lock it using a personal code that you then use to open up the locker. At my backup pool Les Amiraux, you go right into a changing booth, undress, leave all your stuff there, clack the door behind you which then automatically locks, and get an attendant to unlock it when you return after your shower.
Now I was facing system #3: pull a basket from an empty locker, undress in the changing booth and then put the basket with your stuff back into the locker which has a real and actual lock – that you need to insert one euro into to pull it out. What euro? I certainly had never met this situation before and did not have any money on me at all (I did of course have my cell phone, house keys, kleenax, list of pool phone numbers, tickets to get into the pool, a business card with my name, address, phone numbers, email and website address in case I am injured or killed so they know who was injured or who died – but no change whatsoever). Without Anne it would have been a disaster. But generous being that she is – Anne lent me a euro coin to pull out my locker key. And by absolute and unplanned good fortune, we actually finished swimming at the same time, so I could give it back to her just before we walked home together. Which was good because I had already forgotten how to get there and would undoubtedly have gotten miserably lost without my “guide” to show me the way.
Oh does it pay to be a “regular”!
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