Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

The Laugardalslaug swimming hall in Reykjavík is clearly the city’s crown jewel of recreational sports. But to reach its five hot tubs, waterslide, geothermally heated outdoor pool, and Olympic-size indoor pool, one must first get past HafÞór Palsson—and this is no easy task. As the warden of the men’s shower room, it is his job to make sure that each and every pool-goer strips naked and scrubs thoroughly before entering the water.

HafÞór (pronounced HAF-thor) snags me as soon as I enter the shower room. My orange-and-blue swim trunks sport a Hawaiian floral pattern: Clearly I am foreign, and probably a troublemaker.

“You must bring a towel!” HafÞór says to me. His hair comes down to his shoulders; it is tangled and turning gray. He has no eyebrows, only mottled red skin where his eyebrows should be. His fellow warden, whose nametag says “Gunnar,” looks on impassively. “You must bring a towel to the showers!” HafÞór says again, pointing me back in the direction I came from.

Large placards on the shower walls behind him illustrate exactly which body parts must be cleaned with particular attention. Since hundreds of people pass through this room every day, it occurs to me that HafÞór may have seen more naked men than anyone else in Iceland.

What a strange job, I think, to force people to take off their clothes. I try to strike up a conversation with HafÞór, but he gives me a stare that I’m sure he reserves for the real problem cases. I give up and go to fetch my tattered white towel. When I return, HafÞór seems a bit more relaxed, and now that I’m following the rules, I venture another attempt at conversation. “Do you like this job?” I ask him.

“Well, well,” he says. “The hours are not good. Some days I have to wake up at six, some days not until three. But it’s a job, you come in and do your work and they pay you.”

Gunnar leans against the wall nearby, clipboard in hand, surveying his domain. Old men, teenagers, fathers, and sons emerge from the showers. They put on their bathing suits and swimming goggles, and in ones and twos, they file past Gunnar and out of sight.

HafÞór grins at me as if he has thought of something funny. “This morning there was an Italian man, he don’t take off his shorts. He just take the shampoo and shake it inside there.”

HafÞór makes a motion as if he were pulling open an elastic band at his waist and pouring something in. I notice his fingernails, which are an inch long and cracked and yellow. Judging from his stringy hair, I would guess he hasn’t showered in a month, naked or otherwise.

“People are so shy,” HafÞór says. “They are always afraid someone is peeking on them.”

He laughs, and I laugh heartily along with him.

I’m feeling rather shy myself, but I dutifully remove my shorts and take my shower, making sure to scrub all the necessary areas. Then, with a thumbs-up from HafÞór, I pass through a set of heavy doors, into the pool area.

It’s a sunny day, so the Laugardalslaug is extra full. A bridge divides the lap pool from the free-form bathing pool, which is festooned with multi-colored inner tubes, balls, noodles, and inflatable giraffes. A waterslide uncoils into the deep end. Beyond that, a glass-and-metal building houses the recently built Olympic-size indoor pool. The whole complex is encircled with hot tubs (called “hot pots”) of varying temperatures. And everywhere, there are people. Some adults swim dutiful laps, but mostly they sit together and chat. Although it’s against the rules to run, the children do it anyway, laughing as they dart between the hot pots, waterslide, and pool.

Water has always been central to Icelandic culture. Roughly 16 million years ago, the first bits of Iceland erupted out of a volcanic vent on the seafloor. When the Vikings settled here in the ninth century, they discovered a land of burbling springs and mudpots, and they used these springs to cook livestock. (There is a tale about a particular geyser that only erupts when someone throws in a sheep.) Other innovators simply stuck their fingers in the water, realized it was hot, and decided to take a bath.

Today, every town and village has a pool, and all children are required to learn to swim—it is literally the law. Iceland has about 120 public swimming facilities for a population of 304,367. In comparison, New York City offers 65 public swimming facilities for a population nearly 30 times as large.

I return to Laugardalslaug a few mornings later and meet Bjarni (pronounced BYARnee) Kjartansson, the Laugardalslaug’s deputy director. As the sun is just lifting above the blue waterslide, he stands and surveys the people who have gathered in the shallow end to gossip. He is dressed in a yellow bowtie, with a white handkerchief peeking out of his jacket pocket. It is a look that should seem out of place at a swimming hall, but somehow he fits in.

According to Bjarni, everyone fits in at the pool—and this is intentional. Swimming pools were once battlegrounds between the classes, he tells me: Reykjavík’s high society wanted to exclude members of the lower class from swimming lessons. But this notion was eventually quashed by the Icelandic penchant for letting people prove their own worthiness.

“We are all equal. This is an old tradition in Iceland,” Bjarni says, playing with his glasses. “We have a saying here—everybody has to bend their knees when they go to take a dump.”

This sense of equality is even honored by Iceland’s most gifted athletes. Jakob Sveinsson, a two-time Olympian who is representing Iceland at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, trains at Laugardalslaug and shares the pool with the Aegir swimming club, whose members are as young as three years-old. But Sveinsson doesn’t seem to mind. He uses the pool as an athletic facility, but understands that most Icelanders view it primarily as a social hub—a place to meet and chat.

 “All the news you want to hear, all the rumors, everyone talks about it in the hot tub,” he tells me before slipping adroitly back into the pool. “It’s the pub of Iceland.”

I head to the locker room to change into my suit. Armed with my towel, I approach HafÞór and Gunnar and greet them with a smile. I strip naked under their watchful eyes, scrub thoroughly with lots of soap, check the illustrated placard to make sure I haven’t missed any spots, and finally pull my orange floral bathing suit back on. HafÞor gives me an approving nod as I slip past him, outside.

Clumps of chatting teenage girls dangle their feet in the water as screaming kids streak past them. Old men in speedos soak in the hot pots; hairy-chested fathers and pregnant women in bikinis gather in the pool to splash and float and gossip. A tinny waltz croons out of the pool speakers, and at the far end, an attendant leads a group of elderly people in aquatic exercises. Halfway through their calisthenics, they all lift their arms into the air and begin to sing in unison. It is almost magical.

I break into a jog because the air out here is cold, and when I get to the pool I sink gratefully into the crowded water, where it is warm.