Taking a plunge in Canal Saint Martin

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My main focus - just now - is to keep my lips sealed, while I lie, floating on my back, in the middle of the Canal St Martin in Paris.

The place I just duck into is absolutely no azure swimming pool, but rather an industrial canal cut through the city center, where swimming for the last hundred years has been strictly forbidden

And for good reasons!

The river flowing through Paris has been severely polluted, making it possible to contract skin infections, or develop gastroenteritis if you ingest the water.

Not speaking of leptospirosis, or rat disease, which is transmitted via rat corpses or urine!

 

In lieu of all this - why am I this Sunday splashing around in the canal with a happy group of Parisians?

One thing is the heat, but the main reason is:

Because we actually can!

For the last hundred years wild swimming in Paris waters has been strictly forbidden under pain of a fine (or pain of sickness!), but this Sunday and in this small part of the Canal St Martin, it is allowed for the next couple of hours.

The reason is, that the Paris municipality for the last many years has been working towards having some of the 2024 Olympic swimming competitions happening in a cleaned-up Seine.

Several hundred million Euros have been put up to sanitize the Paris waters, and the money has apparently come to good use. Fifty years ago there were only two species of fish in the Seine. Now biologists find more than 30 - and this Sunday they can also find perhaps a hundred Parisians frolicking in the brackish waters of the Canal St Martin

I have dived in as well, hoping that Mayor Hidalgo and her experts know what they are doing, when they this Sunday opened up for a test run of the waters

I'm trying not to think too much about what could be lurking beneath the rather murky surface - and eventually, I'm losing myself in the sheer joy of feeling my limbs slicing through the canal unhindered.

At least until I, amidst the frolicking kids, see an abandoned teddy bear bob by.

Looking closer, the water actually doesn't look that clean - and I get ashore.

Even though my swimming in the murk thus became cut rather short, I will - at least for a little while - bask in the memory of floating free beneath the Parisian sun.

There are less than 12 months until the Olympic swimmers arrive, and I do hope that Paris - litterarily speaking - has put its shit together

I will definitely not want to think of any germs, which could now potentially be swimming gleefully around inside of me!

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