Just another dent in the damage...

I’ve been following Deconstructing Hairy for a while now since it was recommended by a good friend of mine. According to the author’s profile it is written by ‘an Iranian finally living in Iran’ and follows her adventures ‘on being and becoming an Iranian woman’. Recently there has been one particular post that really intrigued me… The Swimming Pool. Here she describes her experiences of a visit to the local pool where attempting to swim a lap round the pool turned out to be just as dangerous as crossing Vali Asr Ave in a hurry.

The ladies were walking, or bouncing, back and forth, the width of the pool which was about 4-5 meters. I figured I could manage to dodge them each time, but that proved impossible as their speed was never consistent and sometimes they would even stop somewhere in the center. So I’€™d swim to a point and turn around before reaching them. But then strange things kept happening. Some of the women started swimming the length of the pool also, they’€™d take a couple laps, always right where I was swimming, stop in random places, continue the bobbing in the shallow end. Other women continued some sorting of bobbing in the deep end, I’m not sure how. I was constantly changing my route. At one point I could have sworn a concerted effort against my lap swimming (I guess it’s not so common here).

In having ‘women only’ areas women in Iran seem to have a better time of it than some of those in the UK who have faced ridicule for exercising their right to, well, exercise! Here, Obsolete (hap tip: Deconstructing Hairy) discusses a story published in the Sun about a Muslim women in Oxford causing outrage by swimming in a public pool wearing ‘full hijab robes’. But it seems the Sun never quite get their facts right as she was in fact wearing a rather trendy Burkini.

I had to laugh out loud at the description of swimming in a pool in Iran. I had exactly the same experience.

My first experience with women’s only swimming in Iran was in Arak where many of the women wore sheer body stockings instead of swimsuits! The horror!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Iran and tagged as fashion, hejab, iranian, islamic republic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.