Swimming Pools in Taipei

So recently I've been swimming a lot at the Shida (NTNU) pool. It's quite expensive but I get more than half off because I am a Shida student. The facilities are decent and they include a spa, steam room, and a sauna. I mostly just use the sauna and the pool though.

When I first started I was pretty satisfied because it was a big improvement from where I used to go at Zhongshan Sports Center (中山運動中心) as that pool was only 25 meters (vs. 50 meters a length at Shida) and now that it's summer it had become unbearably packed at night. The one upside to Zhongshan was that it closed at 10:30 PM, 30 min later than Shida. However, I went swimming this afternoon at Shida and it was deja vu. I changed lanes at least 4 times to try and find a lane with less people. It wasn't just that it was crowded though, the people swimming today just didn't seem to understand basic swimming pool etiquette. Throngs of people would just stand at both sides of the pool so I couldn't do a flip-turn. Then even during swimming people would swim so slowly that I would end up passing 3 or 4 people at a time. Even passing became an ordeal because as I was passing someone, someone from the opposing lane would suddenly want to do the same and would hit me. There were even a group of girls that were just doing handstands or walking in the middle of the swimming lane.

Also, there's this system at Shida where they put up signs that say "慢 （slow）," "中（normal）," and "快（fast）" in each of the lanes in Chinese. However, people swimming incredibly slow, swimming breaststroke, or doing drills with the flotation devices would always choose to swim in the "fast" lane. In the "normal" lane people would just stand around on either side of the pool resting. So I ended up using the "slow" lane even though there were a bunch of kids being taught how to swim in that lane (it turned out to be the fastest lane de facto because it was less crowded).

When I was in the "normal" lane I even hit about 4 people unintentionally. Once I was passing a person and the person in the opposing lane swam near the middle of the lane and I hit him on the head with my hand accidentally rather hard. Then when I was swimming past a person doing the backstroke I hit his arm and when I turned to look, I saw that he had stopped swimming altogether. Then later I was swimming freestyle and this lady hits me hard straight on. This was the last straw. She was swimming completely on the wrong side of the lane! I was fed up by this point so I didn't apologize and just told her straight that she was on the WRONG side of the lane. Then she basically scolded me on how I should look where I'm swimming. Then I told her to look at the ceiling and swim in a straight line. Anyways, she was being rude so finally I just said swim however you like I'm going in another lane.

When I got into the "slow" lane I learned my lesson and constantly looked up ahead of me to dodge kids swimming on the wrong side or other random obstacles that occur in Taiwanese swimming pools and actually ended up having a rather good swim.

[On another note, at the Shida pool they use these planks that they put on one side of the pool so that people can walk on them...I find them rather unnecessary and annoying because they get in the way. Sometimes they put it so that you can't do flip-turns at all on one side and sometimes they are stacked so high in the middle of the pool that it's rather dangerous to swim in those affected lanes. It's also really unnecessary since they could just do 'egg-beater' or swim to keep afloat instead of being lazy, walking on planks].

In other news, it's been raining a lot recently and it's rather annoying.