November 2019: 64 Istanbul Pools Added and Queensland Reviewed
In November 2019 we reviewed every listing in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, and added 64 new Istanbul pools after a user tip led us to a Turkish pool directory.
This November 2019 pool listings update covers three completed regional reviews and a large batch of new pools in Istanbul, Turkey. It also looks ahead to our plans for December.
Listing reviews
In November we reviewed all of our listings in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Germany (18), the Northern Territory (17) and Queensland (284), Australia.
New listings in Istanbul
As we were finishing Queensland, a site user sent us an update for a listing in Turkey. It pointed us to yuzmehavuzu.org, a Turkish site whose name translates as "Swimming Pool Guide". We had seen it before but had not checked it closely. It proved to be a rich source of information about swimming in Turkey.
Within a few days we went through all of the Istanbul pools on that site and added 64 new listings. Only one or two of them are likely to interest international visitors. The Istanbul pools we found do not offer single-visit entry, and a pass requires health certifications that include a range of medical tests, among them an EKG, and sign-offs from a dermatologist and a cardiologist.
The site also covers 33 more of Turkey's 81 provinces. Unless the first provinces we examine prove more welcoming to visitors than Istanbul, we expect to add them in small batches over the next year or two.
Plans for December
In December we plan to see what we can find in Turkey's Adana and Ankara provinces, then work on the German states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate. If time allows, we will start checking a county or two in England. We also intend to update the About Us, FAQ and other supporting pages of the site.
Swimming in the far north
For a winter swim in the far north, the directory lists Wescott Memorial Pool in North Pole, Alaska, and Tromsøbadet, the new 50-meter pool in Tromsø, Norway, that we reported last month, about 350 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. About 900 kilometers farther north is Svalbardhallen in Longyearbyen, on Svalbard.