August 1; Pool life revisited 🏊🏼
Escaping the heat and appreciating the pool(s)... this was my weekend
Happy Sunday,
Temperatures across Southeastern Europe are in the mid 30s to lower 40s this weekend, and that’s in Celsius, not something else. What’s worse, they’re expected to stay there for at least ten more days, and it’s truly worrying to watch the reports of wildfires in Italy, Greece, and Turkey. I hope that everybody traveling and living in those areas stays safe and avoids any troubles.
As far as Ellie and I are concerned, we’re getting our cool by spending the next week in our happy place, Ellie’s family summer home in Troitsa.
One of my favorite things about this house is the garden pool that Ellie’s parents installed about two decades ago. I’ve been having something of a fascination with pools and waterfronts since I was very little, and this one is the first one I can kind-of call my own.
My earliest memories of open water and swimming are ones of fear and fascination. There was a seaside holiday on the Crimean coast when I was about three or four years old, in which I clearly remember how terrified I was of getting into the water, and also of how incredibly huge and endless the Black Sea appeared to me, especially at sunset.
A few years later I took my first swimming lessons, in the training pool of the Olympic Village in Moscow, and there again, all I remember is the pervasive smell of chlorine, and though no longer fearful of the water, I definitely had no passion whatsoever to get into it more than the lessons required.
That all changed another few years later, when we moved to Puerto Rico, and both the ocean beaches and the backyard swimming pools became my natural playgrounds. Especially pools, back then without the now-mandatory 4-foot fencing courtesy of US CPSC, were something of a standard that many people had in their backyards, and which required no packing or travel, unlike the beach.
Somehow that feeling of attachment and fascination with swimming stayed with me since those early days, probably as the result of an acquired taste and the feeling of accessible yet deficit luxury, due to all the different places I lived in. Places which, depending on the latitude, either had pools everywhere, or didn’t have them at all.
About six years ago a wonderful space opened in Sofia, that made me think about the deeper meanings of pools and my attachment to them. Located in a top-floor apartment with a disused rooftop pool, Swimming Pool Sofia is an art-project space, part gallery, part event space, where conceptual exhibitions and literary readings take place, very often around the topic and concept of swimming pools. You might recall I wrote about it a few months ago; it’s a very Berlin-kind-of-place, right in the heart of Sofia.
One night at Swimming Pool in Sofia, we watched the 1968 movie The Swimmer with Burt Lancaster, a surrealist story about a man confronting his past through other people’s swimming pools. Maybe because of the magic of watching it there, actually projected in the disused pool, I realized I could also tell the story of my life through all the pools I’ve swam in.
Two weeks ago, Ellie and I had the chance of seeing another amazing art installation on swimming pools, this time at the Voorlinden Museum near The Hague, in Wassenaar:
And so, to wrap it up, I hope your month of August is one of cool and shade, and may you have your swimming pools to swim in, lounge by, or tell your stories through in plenty 🏊🏼☀️ Here’s more from the pools that left an impression with me over the past few years:
Thanks for checking in today and talk to you next Sunday! 😇
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