Advertisement
Published: June 15th 2011
Edit Blog Post
The Rovigo Swimming Complex
There are a crap-ton of people here, but that's ok because there are a crap-ton of pools to go with them. Well today marks exactly 2 weeks left here in Rovigo, Italy for me. It's amazing how two and a half weeks have already flown by! (And a miracle how I have kept the patience to write an entry for every one of those days plus 3!) Well today featured a common activity in the United States, but with a little bit of a twist: swimming.
At around 11 this morning, Lucia took Paolo and I down to the swimming pool and dropped us off there for a while. Now, unlike the swimming pools in Eaton or other little community pools or municipal pools in America, this pool complex was GIGANTIC. I mean, inside the building alone was 4 or 5 pools (from baby-pools to lap pools) and then you walk outside and there's two more--one being a lap pool and the other where the water-slides are. Yes, that's right, water-slideS. Plural. I was pretty surprised at this complex because of the size of Rovigo that is supposed to be relatively small.
Not to mention that it seemed like every teenager and their grandma in Rovigo was there today. (it's just an expression. There were like 2 grandmas there) I
40 degrees Celsius
Now if you look very closely at the LED display on the wall of the building, you will see that it says 40 degrees. This is proof that I sat for 5 hours in 104 degree weather at the pool :) later found out that it was some sort of "festa di studente" deal (student party) where all of the students in Rovigo got in for a cheaper price of only 5 Euro! (which is about $7 in the USA, so still pretty pricey in my opinion. I wonder what the normal fee is...)
Now one thing that really threw me off was when Paolo handed me a little piece of cloth, which I thought at first was a Speedo. (I thought, I'll stick to my Hawaiian swim-suit thank you very much!) Well, when I unfolded it, it turned out to be a cloth swim-cap. I looked at it really confused and he just started laughing at me (because I'm sure I looked like an idiot). He said I had to wear it in the water--it was a rule. Well, sure enough, EVERYBODY in the pools were wearing one of these swim-caps. The first time I put it on I felt pretty foolish (because we don't have these things in America!) but then I kind of got used to it and was afraid to even think about taking it off in the water because I didn't want a lifeguard to
The Water Slides
These were probably the best part of the pool complex. It's the best way of getting into the water in my opinion :) start yapping at me in Italian.
Speaking of yapping in Italian, a funny little anecdote from today was when Federico was told "no running" (in Italian) by a lifeguard, and then he proceeded to run and jump into the pool. When he came to the surface, the lifeguard asked, "Capisci italiano? (boppity boopity boppity bop!)" That was funny to me because he was asking Federico if he understood Italian. If only he would have asked me that... I could have legitimately responded "No! Non capisco italiano, grazie!" and walked off. That would have been priceless. Well that story is funny to me anyway. Maybe not to you. You might have had to be here.
As I mentioned, they have waterslides at the pool. There are 5 of them- one of which is a normal waterslide, and the other four were racing waterslides, where you could lay on your stomach and fly down the slide as fast as you could. It was pretty entertaining, but sometimes it was painful when you got to the bottom....
It seems that, when it comes to clothing, this pool was fairly... hypocritical. Just looking around at the people that were there, I
The dreaded swim-cap
See my look of disgust? Yes. That was what I felt whenever I was putting it on. came up with two general rules that the pool might have had.
--Rule #1: Wear a swim-cap. We don't want to have other people seeing your hair in the water.
--Rule #2: Expose as much skin as possible. We don't want to have other people seeing the crazy designs on your bathing suit, so the less fabric the better. (Ok this was the one I felt like they had, because it seemed like all of the females in Rovigo were having a contest to see whose bathing suit exposed the most. Even the old folks were getting in on the contest. I think I only saw two one-piece swim suits the whole day. That might even be an over-estimate. It's not my job to examine the amount of fabric each swim-suit had, but only to observe cultural differences between Italy and the USA. And at least in the USA, people generally know when skimpy becomes too skimpy. Just sayin. And I also received a comment from one of my blog readers, as you see way at the bottom, that the skimpiness didn't stop just at the girls... it seemed like 75% of the guys there were in on the competition
Rovigo fountain at dark
I know you can't see much in this photo, and I'm sorry for that. But it was so cool looking and I had to take a picture but it didn't turn out well. Plus, there was room for another picture within the text of this blog entry, so I tried to fill it with something... too. Nasty...)
Well throughout the whole day, Paolo, his friends and I just went back and forth between swimming, racing on the slides, and laying in the sun (yes mom, I used sunscreen. Several times. And unfortunately, it wasn't as good as I thought). People were gasping at the fact that it had gotten up to 40 degrees. I thought, "wow... woopity-doo..." until I realized that they measure degrees in Celsius. So I did the math... 40 divided by 5, times 9, plus 32. 104 degrees?!?!?!??! That's ridiculous! And it felt like I was in an oven too. I can't believe that I wasn't really confused by the 40 degrees at first... if they were talkin fahrenhiet, we wouldn't be swimming.
Eventually we were done (after 5 hours) and went home, where we just chilled for a while (literally, because we were tired of the heat). After an episode of House and reading some Clockwork Orange, we were ready to go out again, so we went into downtown Rovigo and met some a Paolo's friends by the post office. After chatting for a while, we went for a walk around and once again went to the Caffe Borsa (The "Coffee Bag"- the place where I got the name for a previous post, "American hot chocolate is LAME".) On the way there, we looked up at the moon randomly and notice, hey! It's a lunar eclipse! Quite a surprise to actually see one without knowing that it was happening before-hand. I later looked it up and discovered that it was a "total lunar eclipse"-- a rare eclipse where the center-point of the Earth's shadow crosses the moon to make an eclipse. Apparantly the next time this will happen is in 2029. Not to mention, it was really awesome being in Italy to see it! Che fortunato! (How lucky!)
Anyways... back to Caffe Borsa. There, I had the chance to talk to some of Paolo's friends that I had just met about some random things about my own life and the differences between American and Italian lives. They asked the usual questions about favorite films, bands, shows, my birthday etc. Then they asked me about Obama and if I liked him or not (tried to be un-biased because I didn't want to offend them or anything) and then they asked me what Americans think about Silvio Berlusconi. Now here's basically what I conveyed to them about that... if you asked a group of 10 Americans what he/she thought about this guy, 9 out of 10 of them would have no idea who in the world he is. One half of the 10th guy may have heard of him, but the other half of that guy (making, in math terms, 5% of the American populace) would actually know anything meaningful and political about him. I told them we can be very insulated from foreign affairs and that I personally wasn't too interested in politics. They all agreed that they weren't much either, but just curious. On a positive note, I would incorporate some Italian into what I was saying and a couple of the girls were really surprised when they asked me how long I've been studying Italian and my answer was "two weeks". Heck yes.
Anyway, eventually we left Caffe Borsa and walked back to the post office, where we talked for a while longer until Nico came and picked us up.
That was basically my day! Now don't go around having skimpy-bathing suit contests, or some random kid with a blog might write about you.
Buonanotte!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.04s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 7; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0194s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
Leasa Magnuson
non-member comment
Swim Cap
Love the picture of you in the swim cap! Last time I was in Europe I noticed that the swim suits were skimpy and not just on the girls!