Hot-Tubbin'

Greetings Gentle Readers.
And so the two week excursion which was supposed to ameliorate long-standing tensions and resolve internal conflicts with a longer term goal of restoring mental and physical health comes to a close.  At time of writing, I am three and a quarter hours away from landing at Edmonton International Airport, at which point I can begin grousing about the awful civil planning that used public transport to snarl traffic across the city, and yet cannot connect the airport to the city centre.

What have we learnt?

First of all, thanks to my father, I did some investigation and discovered that "learnt" is the past tense of the verb "learn" in the same way that the past tense of the verb "burn" is "burnt."  If one adds an "-ed" suffix to the root verb, you create an adjective.  Someone who has lots of fancy book-learning, or is wise in the ways of academia is said to be "learned."  By the same token, an arsonist may say that the house is burned to the ground, but she was also the one who burnt it.

No, Seriously

OK.  Here's something that is immediate and relevant to my thoughts - hot springs.  Icelanders call them thermal pools, geoactive baths, or just pools.  In the course of trying to fix my spine, I have spent days using these wonders of Iceland to relax my vertebrae and apparently exfoliate several layers of skin.  Here are some of the things I've learnt.

Modesty is Kinda Quaint

I remember teaching high-school girls phys-ed at Francis Xavier High School.  I didn't ask for the assignment, and I certainly didn't enjoy it.  During one class when the class was supposed to be learning the backstroke, I was told rather firmly by one student that she was too scared to put her head underwater, and therefore couldn't participate in the class.  She clung tenaciously to a ladder at the shallow end of the pool and asked if she could practice treading water instead.  I'm passive-aggressive and avoid confrontations now, but back then, I was a pushover.  That, and I was worried about what would happen to the water in the pool if it was suddenly exposed to the pancake makeup and the many different types of hair care products that went into coiffuring the architecturally elaborate structure atop her cranium.  I'm sure that Environment Canada would have fed me to David Suzuki if I'd let that wee narcissist dunk her head into any shared water source.
That being said, I forgot my towel when going to the thermal pools near downtown Reykjavik.  All swimmers must be dry before approaching the locker areas, so I had to stand buck nekkid and blow dry myself with the wall-mounted automatic hair dryers.  Apparently, I'm not the first person to do so, since no one else cared.  Since then, I've tried to observe the different standards of privacy and modesty.  For example, in Reyksjanesbær, there are no private showering stalls.  There are precious few in the capital city, but if you want to maintain your privacy, it stops when the locals don't feel like indulging the quaint behavioural anomalies of tourists.
People who sheepishly try to hide themselves behind towels, t-shirts, boxes of breakfast cereal, etc. will often find themselves the objects of scorn and derision from the roving gangs of flabby, overweight grandparents who have no idea what you think you're hiding that they've never seen before.

Beware the Water Slides

The thermal spas that I patronized had water slides, and they had a couple of things in common.
When you climbed to the top, people outside of the spa compound could see your half-naked body shivering in the frost and mist.
The water flow is never sufficient to get you all the way down the slide without some sort of propulsion from your arms and legs.  Unless you fling yourself down the chute with reckless abandon.
The water slide pools are always kept separately from the other pools.  Why?  They're chlorinated.
I have yet to parse this last bit out.  Everything else, from the steam rooms to the saunas to the pools themselves, smells of rotten eggs.  It's like one big scene out of a Margaret Lawrence novel.  Luckily, the water only has low dilutions of sulfurous acid (H₂SO₃), not sulfuric acid (H₂SO₄) and therefore will shut down your sense of smell faster than it will dissolve you like a Yellowstone hiker. Maybe the geothermically activated groundwater will gum up the water slides.  Maybe kids are more likely to void themselves on thrilling descents.

It's a Matter of Degrees

Icelanders are very conscientious about maintaining the precise temperature of each of the thermal pools at every given location.  As near as I can tell, the thermal pool precedes any urban development.  People find a hot spring, and then build a town or city around it, not the reverse.  Once they've found the "geysir,"  they carefully control and regulate it.  Personally, I had never given much thought to the variance in bath water temperature, but in such a highly-regulated environment, it's difficult not to notice.  For example, stewing in 42°C for an hour makes you some kind of super hero, but no-one bats an eye if you spend three consecutive hours in the 38°C pool.  Invariably, there is a 2°C tub for those that would like to do an ice bucket challenge for no good reason whatsoever.
That's about it for now.  It's been a long day's worth of travel, involving landing in an aircraft earlier in time than when we left.  Didn't even need a TARDIS.  Until next time,
Goodnight England and the Colonies,
—mARKUS