Swimming - Czech Style!

On Friday we headed to the town of Karlovy Vary. The town is known for its thermal baths and spas and Bertie and I each got massages. Besides massages, you can also get any kind of plastic surgery, liposuction, oxygen chamber treatments? and any number of other things. The thermal water is supposed to cure all your ailments if you drink it.


My friend Martina had told me that the town was owned by Russians and was filled with "new Russian money." She was right. The only regular flight in and out of the airport is to Moscow and the menus in the restaurants - in addition to being printed Czech, English, and German - were also printed in Russian. As we walked around the town, the Russian presence was clear. Though the buildings in the town were clearly old, they all had a fresh coat of paint on them and looked bright and colorful and new.
We passed a statue of Karl Marx and a huge Russian Orthodox Church with turquoise turets with gold trim that looked like it was straight out of Moscow.

We also went to a "pizzeria" for dinner where the walls were covered in gold leaf.

By far the highlight of the town (for me, anyway) was a visit to the thermal swimming pool! An outdoor, heated, 50 meter pool filled with thermal water! As I asked two different hotel receptionists indpendently about the pool and how to get there, and they each looked at me with this look of surprise and said in broken english "You know it is not covered?" I said that yes, I realized that, and verified that it was in fact heated. So off I went at 9am this morning, after a full breakfast, in search of the pool. After a 20 min hike and negotiating the process for paying my entry, finding the changing room, and securing a locker, I headed to the pool. It was awesome! You actually enter the pool indoors, so you don't have to stand outside in your swimsuit in the below 50 degree air! Then you swim under this wall and you are outside! A thermometer above the pool read - air temp. 9 degrees C, water temp. 29.5 degrees C (about 84 or so degrees F I think.) It was warm!

I sat at one end for a moment, trying to observe if there were any rules I should be following. There were no lane ropes and about a dozen people were already swimming. None appeared to be circle swimming or anything close, it was more of a free for all. So I grabbed a spot along the wall hoping to stay out of people's way. I was clearly the only person in the pool attempting anything other than a breaststroke/float to the other end. Such a waste of a 50 m pool!!! I was also the only person, in my bright uglies swimsuit, wearing anything other than black! Despite the fact that I only had time to squeeze in 1500 m, it felt great! My arms had forgotten that they once had a purpose other than pulling suitcase around and moving food from plate to mouth!

I felt so great after the swim and the 20 min hike back to the hotel, the 2 hr bus ride back to Prague was bearable. And shortly after arriving back in Prague, Emily and Jeremy arrived! Yay!