Catch up time

Its Friday night, but the last thing I want to do is go out to a party or night club. Thats because for the last two weeks I have been going bull at gate with commuting, the girlfriend, work and of course the intensive university program I'm undertaking.

I handed in my second assignment in two weeks today in the afternoon and finished off my work for Alfa.lt shortly after. Anton, the Ukrainian guy I live with, and I went to check out the local pool and sauna, which is around the corner.

Its a small pool (just 25m or less even) and it has four lanes. Three of these lanes were blocked off for children's use and the remaining lane was being shared by about eight people. As anyone who has done laps in a pool would know, it was a little cramped in there.

Anton jumped in the pool and attempted to swim, but it was clear that he had never had a single lesson before. With every stroke he edged closer to having lungs full of water.

A funny thing about that is that when he went to the United States to work for a summer, he applied for a job as a lifesaver at a pool. He didn't get the job because he wasn't good at diving, but I think he should thank his lucky stars that he wasn't given the job or he could be dead by now...Not to mention those people he would have been saving.

I had my goggles with me so I could see underwater, but Anton did not and he came out of the pool with bright red eyes. Indoor pools are always over-chlorinated, but this one had a bit of extra oompf for good luck or something. 

One of my classmates told me incidentally that it is not the chlorine actually, but the mixture of chlorine and urine that makes your eyes go red. Supposedly when the chemicals mix there is a reaction and the eye-reddening stuff is made. There were a lot of kids in the pool, so it could be true, but my god were Anton's eyes red....

After the pool we went to the sauna to check out it. Upon entering the room we were chastised by a pair of old Swedish men with their dicks waving about. Apparently it is more or less illegal to go into a sauna with your bathers on. They said its for two reasons. The first is that you take too much sweat back into the pool via your shorts so they need to keep topping up the chlorine (never heard that one before, but it would explain Anton's eyes). The second reason was that they thought that the chlorine from the shorts would evaporate and cause a poisonous gas cloud to form and choke us all in the sauna. Sounds a bit like fantasy...

After lecturing us about the woes of bathers in the sauna, they started chatting to us about how high the taxes are in Sweden. Soon after we got out and went home.

Now I'm just happy to sit here and get a good night's rest. I might even manage to finish my book finally!