Over the past week or two.....posters have started to go up around public pools in Germany. They end up at the entrance and basically resemble a US comic book style drawing....thirteen drawings in full rich color....with "Baderegeln" across the top.
The poster is supposed to hint various rules of behavior at pools.
You aren't supposed to grab women's butts or bikini bottoms.
You can wear any normal clothing for the pool, of a decent fashion.
Everyone is supposed to act friendly toward others at the pool.
Be hygienic.
Don't stare at women.
Under each picture, is the German brief description for the behavior expected.
I looked at the drawing and it occurs to me that this wasn't something that occurred overnight. To design this....draw it....mass-produce it.....someone had to be already working on this back in the summer of 2015. It might come out now after the Koln business to be standard.....but already six months ago....it appears that they saw problems with public behavior at German pools.
For an American, German pools are a fairly different kind of operation. It surprises me on the number and quantity throughout Germany. Any decent sized village will have an outdoor pool. Most major urban areas (like Mainz or Wiesbaden) will have at least one indoor pool....sometimes two or three of them.
In the Ramstein area.....back in the 1990s.....they built up a major indoor pool complex....almost as good a quality as a four-star resort. A decade later on the east end of Kaiserslautern, they added another huge indoor complex.
All of this leads a large segment of the German population to regularly swim for exercise and stress-relief purposes. I won't say it's cheap anymore, unless you have a standard outdoor complex.
As for the poster effect It's hard to say if the problem-people will really pay attention to it or grasp what the Germans are suggesting. Germans always have this perception....problems can be fixed. In this case, I'm not sure that a simple poster will fix a complex problem. If it was.....we'd have posters plastered all over buses, trains, sidewalks, public buildings, libraries and schools.
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