Summer is fast approaching in Germany. Typically, people would be preparing right now for bar-b-q's in the backyard, their vacation to some summer resort, the brief but intense renovation project for the bathroom, and the village pool season.
If you are an American and spent time in Germany.....you know that these town and village pools are a magnet for Germans. There on a two-acre plot of ground, romances are kindled....kids establish new friendships....torrid affairs started....and tans are put upon pure white skins. Gossip is generated. Scandal is suggested. Hearsay is swapped. And hot summer afternoons pass.....as they have for decades.
Well....up until now.
I noticed in regional news that Basel, Switzerland got brought up today. The pool management crowd has decided that it need to establish some new rules for the city pool there. If you want to enter and stay around the city pool (a rather large grounds which include a large grassy area).....you need to be in a bikini (to include topless options), a swimsuit, or a tight-fitting full-body swimsuit (sometimes referred to as a Burkini).
They decided that the old rules allowed a number of women to enter in just plain street clothing or something called a "wide-Burkini".....and this just wouldn't work.
The slant of this change? Well....what they say is that there's no hygiene positives.....by these women wearing the wide-burkinis or regular street clothing.
It's hard to imagine how this topic got brought up and discussed in a meeting.....especially talking about a pool situation....where you pour in ten gallons a week of chlorine.....to fix up the amount of pee that kids are dumping into a public pool. If you were disturbed by hygiene.....there's some higher priorities on my list to be worried about.
Somewhere in this article I read over at Focus....they even got around to talking about increased security that had to be brought in last year at a city pool operation in Germany because of tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims.
This is also the article which brought up that Muslims had suggested having separate bathing times at the local pool in Duisburg,Germany.....for Muslims and non-Muslims. The pool staff stood there for a moment, and then responded that integration was about having no dividing lines between two separate societies. There would be no separate operations for anything, period.
It is silly in some ways to view this marginal 'battlefield' existing in Germany, where conservative views of some religion are running into two-thousand years of European society development.
If you were looking at a major threat for conservative lifestyles.....the German pool might be number one on the list. And we haven't even gotten to rap music in the background, beer being sold and consumed, pork products in display, juvenile German guy behavior, or ultra-ultra-ultra bikinis.
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