This post contains NUDE BEACH info.
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After German class, B picked me up at school. We drove to our friends' house for lunch.
They live on the 3rd floor of a place built in the 1870s. Stone steps in the stairway (I thought they were concrete, silly me) and the apartments have wood floors laid out in a herringbone pattern---large pieces of wood, too. High ceilings, to disperse the heat on summer days.
V (the wife) fixed us a delicious lunch, then we headed off for the
Gänsehäufel. This island had been a public swimming and recreation area for about a hundred years.
I'm indifferent to swimming and water culture---if someone wants to go, I'll go. If the water is warm enough, or if it's blazing hot outside and I need to cool off, I'll swim. If not, I'll lay around and read or talk or watch the clouds form shapes in the sky...
It being one of the few warm sunny days Vienna has had since my arrival three weeks ago, the place was jumping. There are numerous pools and the normal public pool screaming and running and blowing of whistles by the lifeguards, but we were headed for the real water, the shore of the island, which sits in a branch of the Danube.
We entered a gate. There was a sign showing a man and woman in swimsuits, with a red slash through it. Another sign showed a camera with a red slash through it...
NUDE BEACH!
It's a beautiful grassy area, like a park, with lots of old, tall trees to provide shade. And here's where GroupThink comes in, or the Influence of the Masses, or the Hive Mind: walking across the grass for several hundred meters to the waters edge, you're conscious of how you stand out
because you have clothes on. What's usually the norm becomes obviously NOT the norm in this topsy-turvy madness of nude nekkidness.
You can disrobe at the entrance if you want, or you can walk to your spot on the beach, but this isn't a "clothing optional" area, it's a nudist area, and if you're going to stay here you
gotta disrobe. Which the others did immediately when we found our spot. And me, a first-timer, I thought:
Well, if in Vienna, do as the Viennese do. So I stripped down.
In a way it's kind of sad that a guy gets to be 53 years old and has never been naked outdoors, isn't it? I mean,
really. (Well, except for that one night with a former girlfriend on a ranch after we'd taken mushrooms. Different set of circumstances.)
I've seen nudist areas before. There's a nudist section on the Danube Island and we rode our bikes through there once---for the first thirty seconds it's kind of unusual but it's amazing how quickly you get used to it. The same when you actually get nude yourself---it takes about five minutes to get used to the idea but then you realize you're having the same types of conversations and doing the same sort of things, like reading or swimming or watching the clouds, and then you just sort of
forget about it. Nothing different is happening
except for the nudism. It's business as usual.
Things I noticed:
- However self-conscious you think you "should" be, if you look around you'll see lots of other people who share your same "defects," or worse. Hell, you don't even have to look around---they'll walk right past you. I saw no one there I was repelled by, though your mind has been programmed to think you should be repelled by people if they're overweight, saggy, wrinkled, or whatever.
- Of the hundreds of people I saw, I noticed maybe two women between the ages of 18 - 25. We talked about this and the conclusion of the others was, young women are simply too self-conscious about their appearance, due to the influence of magazines and television, etc. They think they have to look perfect. My theory is a little less well thought-out: they probably just don't want men leering at them. Except, there was no leering going on at all, and despite what young women may think about themselves, there are plenty of attractive women older than 25 on this planet---and the ones I saw on the island weren't getting leered at. Pro tip to young women: you're not necessarily the most "imperfect" or the hottest thing on the beach. I'm just sayin'.
- Mostly I noticed my own reactions to being in a new situation for the first time. I question my thinking all the time anyhow, so this in itself isn't unusual---I just had different things to think about. Some questions I asked myself: How come the Austrians can embrace this with such ease and the Americans can't? How come I've been nervous in the past about disrobing in front of people (except for girlfriends, wives, and doctors of course)?What if an ant tries to crawl up my ass?
- Vienna is a town with a lot of immigrants, but due to their own cultural considerations the immigrants don't come to the nude beach. They visit the "regular" swimming area of the park.
- There were several young children at the nude beach but they never let out a peep, except for occasional laughter...there wasn't the usual screaming / screeching / shouting / eardrum-splitting noises these young 'uns seem determined to emit. My friend S. wouldn't have wanted to do any child-killin' at the nude beach; them young 'uns was well behaved. But she might have wanted to kill me for leering at her. (Just kidding, S.---it was a leer-free zone.)
Late in the afternoon we strolled over to the nearby outdoor snack bar and had some drinks and pastries. And even though I'd never sat around with a bunch of naked people before, it seemed pretty natural.
Oddly enough.
