Analysis of the river experience

Ok, the first and indispensable thing anyone needs to go into the Rhine (we adopt the german terminology of the river from now on), is a bag like the one in the left. You don't have to buy it red or in this shape, I'm just showing you the most fashionable 20 L. bag model you can find nowadays in the city. And that is basically all the material we need for this activity. Well, a swimming costume can also be useful for the purpose of the activity but I think no one would tell you anyhthing if you just carry the bag.

Next is to walk (or run) towards the "enter point" you choose. I usually go three bridges from my place. This trip will go backwards because of course I won't risk the life of my camera to take pictures from the water.

While you are in the water, at some point you can grab one of the orange buoys if you want to stop for some moment because obviously, if you just don't do anything you continue going downstream. But not all the buoys are the same. The blue ones situated more in the middle of the river (where the speed is higher) are the good ones. One of the most funny things if you calculate good enough to catch it. In my first blue buoy on friday I almost entered in the club of the ones that just carry the bag...almost. Advice for the men: If you want to try the first two blue buoys, remember to tighten your swimming costume before. (La tercera boya azul es para mariquitas)

There is also a little swiss beach if you want to stop for a while while going towards the entry point. It is not exactly like Costa Brava but its the better you can find here. Here we make a pause to dismitify the "cleaniness" of this country. I don't understand how the only little piece of sand they have here to relax on sundays is full of bottles, cans and other stuff. Anyway the unltraminibeach is decent considering we are not in a country with sea coast, and you can even see some local fauna while sun-tanning. Well, if the beach is too dirty for your taste you can try another (very weird) option. There is a kind of structure that people use to take some sun. I don't understand why you have to be in a platform like that for lying under the sun but that's how it is. Maybe long time ago they decided to build the structure of what was going to be a huge building in front of the river which was never finished, and the mayor decided to promote the place as "suntanning in the heights". There are some showers in the platform also (reeeeealy cold).

After the beach we go through a kind of park with its own swimming pool for the children, and after walking through it and leaving the Roche headquarters on the left, we finally are in the "entry point". Important. Follow the indications (easy to get that even if you have my german level) of where to swim and not to swim because you don't want to find a huge ship transporting tons of stuff right in front of your nose after going under one of the bridges. No, no good for your skeleton.

Well, now its official again, it's not that I hate blogger.com. the truth is that blogger.com hates me. So no images of the indications panel (the best pic) and myself before entering the river today with Fernanda and Helen (two friends from LBS). Yes, today I finished work, went for a run and I went for a swim with Helen around 8:30PM.

Now I'll watch another episode of 24 (kiefer Sutherland), the series to which I am officialy addicted. I guess that Ali gave to me the 7 DVDs of the whole thing in order to make me feel so sleepy in the mornings as her ;) Just one thing that I don't really like from 24, well its not that I don't like it, its just that I find stupid to see so many people working ALL the time without light, in the pure darkness. Even worse that the darkness of the CSI offices. Why it has to be so dark? what a quality of job is that, to work in the dark!!! At least I'm sure that the spanish counter-terrorist cops work with light (oh, well, we don't have any of those in Spain).

Good night. the music while writing this: Najwa - so often (because so often blogger.com image loading is....)