By the turning of 2007 to 2008, New Year resolutions are to be made in such way:

Smaller belle, bigger turnover; weaker temper, stronger muscle; less time to draw, more time to read; closer team work, further travel, lower calories, higher profit, quicker job progress, slower timing… wishful thinking

Suprisingly, i find myself having dipped around 8 pools in Shanghai since 2003, namely, minren yuan pool, pudong navation college outdoor pool, guozhong hotel pool , tongmao hotel pool, jing an pool, pudong swimming center, shanghai swimming gymnastic (WanTiGuan), and most recently pu dong yuanshen pool,

But i feel hard to recommend anyone of the above venues.

The most annoying thing is not about the pool itself; I have almost nothing to complain about the technical sides of most of the pools in China. In the WTG, the movable tank floor is in fact the first I‘ve seen in China. This is obviously catered for both the competition and leisure uses.

 The only nuisance inside the pool is that: sometimes some people stand chatting on the lane when serious swimmers want to go straight; or some swimers do not observe the one-way-clockwise rule).

However, I am going to complain about the hygenic and comfort conditions, which is saddly ignored by the management and even the users.

My experience of swimming in the WTG few days ago was awful.

Here, we have dirty plastic floor sheets, unpleasant draught crossing the changing area, corridors and stairways. Outside the changing village, I suddenly saw two training pools, situating in an area that can be defined as neither male change area nor female changing area; and a female staff standing there makes me just wanting to step back to the male domain. Huge canvas sheets hanging from the ceiling screened the watching area from the pool hall, to save some heeting cost, which is fine, although it’s a bit bizare under this massive certain.

I think it is humane to provide family changing cubicles for small group users, and group changing rooms for teams. I hate changing clothes in open plan rooms, where people need to have stong nerves to stand those crossing visual contacts, some of which I would rank as doggy behaviour. Also, staff with or without uniforms pondering around the changing area 'supervising' naked people, this makes the whole dressing/undressing process indecent. Without decent sitting bench, I had to stand on one foot on the icy cold floor (even worse: fucking cold water from nowhere) (no insultation underneath i bet), and another trambling leg stretched hard to search the right hole of my pans.

This nation has great enthusiam in making building apperance grant, but is lack of interest in making our habitant cleaner.

If British have hygienic stubbornness to certain levels, then Germany are real meticulous people who make swimming pools comfortable places to stay. When we worked on a pool design in Karlsruhe Germany, we need to stick to the single-direction sequency, which segregates boot-wearing area from bear-foot area. The changing village is designed as a ‘filter’, from one side of which dressed people come in and another side naked people come out, and vis versa. In many of the swimming centers, the functions related to water (such as suana, spa, lersuire water lazy river, while pool etc are grouped in such a way that people can spend most of the day inside.

Hoping better swimming pools would born....