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The things of life: bikini and cake

2019-11-07T13:46:49.228Z


The last sunny days, shorter evenings. High time to preserve the light summer feeling. For example with memories of carefree days at the Wörthersee and what they can teach us.



There are no parties, no sparkling wine and no fireworks. But the feeling of "a new year begins" is at least as pronounced at the beginning of autumn as it was on 1 January. The turn of the year in the middle of the year is accompanied by real changes. While the days around New Year's Eve are usually completely gray, brightened only by the remaining Christmas lights, the last of the late summer days are being replaced by a noticeable dawn.

The trees turn colorful and soon they turn bald. Everyday life has rhythm and structure again. The schoolchildren are on their way at eight o'clock in the morning. In the office, those holidaymates who were traveling in the off-season are back in the office. The airy clothes hang in the closet again in the second row, the wool sweaters are in front. With the rest of the summer, good intentions are set: stay positive, do not let yourself go crazy, save the summer feeling in the autumn.

A very last Aperol Spritz for this season, let your thoughts wander, for example, how carefree the bathing days at Lake Wörthersee were. A journey there is always like a journey back in time. Not only because of the Heimatfilmkulisse, but also because of the completely unagitated mood. Even in this millennium it could happen there that one suddenly met Peter Alexander, before the driveway to his villa, with a silk cloth around his neck and actually looking exactly like Peter Alexander.

To bathe in the sparkling blue lake, one goes into one of the old-fashioned beach baths. The most beautiful is in Krumpendorf. At the entrance is a small wooden house, someone requires a few euros admission, but often no one sits there, nothing is seen here particularly tight. A short gravel path and then the green lawn spreads like a carpet. At its edge the glittering blue and a few wooden walkways, which reach out to the lake. The true beach professionals spread their towels on one of the footbridges, in the morning between nine and half past nine. Then many ladies arrive with couches and larger bath bags, and single gentlemen, who carry only a rolled up cloth under the arm. If you come at this time, swim first.

On hot days, almost all women wear a bikini, the thinner and the thicker, the forty-year-old and the eighty-year-old. With a matter of course, which does not want to demonstrate anything, but stems from the fact that one bathing and swimming in midsummer wearing bikini, because bathing suits sticking unpleasantly to the stomach and because you can sunbathe in a bikini also better. "But you already have a nice color," says an elderly lady to another elderly lady.

Am I the only one who finds it remarkable that the women and men here show themselves completely naturally as they are? Without artfully covering up with any airy cloths or posing with a dumb pride a little strained? Maybe it's the advanced age of many bathers, maybe they just know that getting older is also a privilege, that a body changes in the course of life. Anyway, a single visit to this bath reveals the whole body cult of our present as a grandiose frippery.

By the way, there is a café opposite the jetty, at about half past ten the daily freshly baked apricot cake comes out of the oven, it is served lukewarm and with a large portion of whipped cream. This could be a suggestion for the new year, such a cake also tastes on a morning in November.

Source: spiegel

All business articles on 2019-11-07

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