Ma highlight in the outdoor pool is far away from the pool. From my favorite place you have to walk across the entire lawn. That’s only 200, at most 300 meters, but it can feel pretty far at more than 30 degrees. But they are worth it. Arriving at the other end, there is a hut in the pleasantly cool shade of the trees, from which it smells wonderfully of frying fat.
Burgers, pizza and tarte flambée are written on the board. I order fries, with ketchup. The employee energetically fills the golden sticks into a paper bag, his colleague puts a dab of ketchup on it from these huge buckets for the gastro, wraps a serviette around it and hands it to me. Happiness in a red and white striped bag.
There’s no place in the world where fries taste as good as in an outdoor pool, not even when you’re drunk after a night of dancing in a kebab shop. When you come out of the pool exhausted because you’ve been swimming diligently or just fooled around, when your skin still feels cold from the water and you’re sweating again because it’s just so hot when you’re on the lawn drops his towel—then nothing beats a nice helping of fries, and never mind that one half got soaked in ketchup until you got back to your blanket, while the other half sadly got no red sauce at all has gotten.
It goes without saying that children like fries. But the adults in front of and behind me in the queue also order fries. what makes her so good
More than just quick and salty
The internet, of course, provides some theories. Because we lose so much salt when sweating, the body is happy about a quick compensation with fries, a spokesman for the Berlin baths explained to the portal “Chip.de” (What does Karl Lauterbach think of it?). The explanation given by an ecotrophologist to Bild last year is a little more banal: “Because it tastes good.” But she also adds that fries can be prepared quickly and that swimming burns a lot of calories, which the body then demands back.
It’s really quick at the french fries queue, and they’re cheap too: at three euros, they cost only a third of burgers and pizzas in Frankfurt’s Brentanobad. For bargain hunters and those who are hungry, this will certainly also be a decisive factor, but for my part I believe that something else is essential: the world stops for a moment in the outdoor pool. You can’t take your smartphone into the water, instead it’s safely in the locker. And so you suddenly spend a few wonderful hours without calls, without Whatsapp messages, without Instagram, without breaking news. You are thrown back into an analog time – and thus also into your own childhood.
As far as I can remember, I practically spent the summer at the outdoor pool. My brother and I swam until our lips were blue and our parents insisted we come back to shore. On the ceiling we leafed through magazines, the thin pages of which stuck to our wet fingers, and played countless rounds of Uno and Kniffel. We rarely had fries: in a cool box we had gummy bears, apple slices and rolls with butter and salami (also good). But maybe the fries taste so good to me in my late 20s because they used to only be served on very special occasions. (The fact that I don’t feel like making myself a snack might also play a role, and that as a vegetarian I no longer eat salami.)
Pool fries are a feeling
Sarah Connor even grabbed the outdoor pool fries memories from her youth in 2019 in a song: “And these free-free outdoor pool fries still taste like before / we never had too much chlorine skin and Capri sun / hickeys, lovesickness, why aren’t you here ?”. French fries as a constant, as a connection to good times.
Fries at the pool aren’t just food, they’re a feeling. They taste of lightheartedness. The world out there with all its worries doesn’t exist at this moment. Just like the calories you scoop in at the pool don’t count, especially since most of the time you realize that outside of Instagram almost nobody has a “bikini body” anyway.
The only flaw with outdoor pool fries is that you eventually get to the end of the bag. On the other hand, only one thing helps: come back to the outdoor pool tomorrow.
#ode #pool #fries #taste #lightheartedness