ISomewhere on the country road behind Wasserburg it comes up, that childhood summer feeling. You trundle behind a tractor through forest and meadows, roll down the car window, smell grass and tar and see the shrine passing by in front of the farms. It’s the best time of the year, everything feels like an eternal holiday, and there’s one more thing to be happy about: a lake. A lake with a jetty that sounds a bit dull under your bare feet and where you can daydream or from which you can jump into the water with a running start. A lake with a lawn and kiosk and old, shady trees.
The Obinger See is small and is located opposite the also very manageable village with a church and a few inns. From here it is only ten kilometers to Lake Chiemsee, but who wants to go to Lake Chiemsee in the high season, where tourists are jostling for parking spaces and café chairs? Strandbad Obing, on the other hand: On a morning when the children still have to go to school, older people and young mothers in particular camp here with their children on the shore. The retirees put the sun loungers they brought with them in the shade of the birch trees or under the blue sunshades with the ice cream advertisements. Ducks in the green water and bees in the clover of the sunbathing area are equal to the human guests. In the event of a bee sting that results in anaphylactic shock, hopefully the lifeguard volunteers who are drinking coffee on the terrace of their boathouse, having a little chat and keeping a close eye on what is happening, will hopefully rescue you.
Water temperature: 23 degrees
However, no catastrophe is announced, the lake lies flat and uneventful like a pond. What causes most excitement this morning is the temperature: only 22 degrees, the bathers moan in front of the sign on the water rescue hut, with the 22 turning into 23 at some point over the hours.
After all, uneventfulness is what one craves most in this strange summer of disasters, and here it is. The world purrs together on the trinity of water, sky and church tower, because the tower of the Gothic Saint Lawrence Church is reflected in the water, as if some tourism manager had helped here with an image editing program. If you turn your head a little bit to the right, you see forest and meadows, if you turn it to the left, you see mountains. If you put it on your neck, you can see the clouds in the blue sky. Luckily there isn’t much else to do. A visit to the lido in Obing is an exercise in deceleration.
praise of modesty
Masters of this art of contemplative slowness are the two older gentlemen sitting next to each other on a beer bench in front of the kiosk with their backs to the wall and just looking. They drink their beer very leisurely for hours, occasionally adding a blackcurrant spritzer, and only very, very rarely do they change half a sentence. Do you think it is inconvenient that the young tenant who has just taken over the kiosk has torn out the old cabins and installed a lounge under the wooden roof instead? I don’t give a damn who leases the kiosk below me, says her posture. The other locals at the tables are surprisingly tattooed and order fries, beer and ice cream, as is the lido’s custom. On the sunbathing lawn, you can still marvel at the good old freezer, which some thought was extinct: couples of pensioners picnic devoutly collecting cheese, sliced cucumbers and hard-boiled eggs. A praise of modesty! These people don’t give a damn about canceled flights to Mallorca, nor do they need coffee from paper cups in line at the airport to distract themselves while waiting for holiday bliss. Happiness is already here.
sunken past
Ludwig Bürger, the retired headmaster and local curator, knows that things have always been modest here at Lake Obing. The lake originally belonged to the nearby farm, which was recently converted into a condominium complex. The locals have always bathed here; As a boy in the post-war period, Bürger himself dived for the weapons that the Americans had disposed of in the lake when they left: “Once I found a hand grenade, it was a show.” the nearby Wacker chemical plant. “Back then, almost every homeowner cleared their bedroom and rented it out to guests,” says Bürger. They stayed for a fortnight, tanned their pale bodies in the lido, swam in the lake and went to the inn in the evenings: “One was not very mobile, hardly anyone had a car back then.” Many young people would have enjoyed themselves at the lake at the time, even today it is announced on the sunbathing lawn is the “Caring Mother”, a sculpture by the wood carver Ernst Hofstetter from Obingen, from this time when the lido was the center of holiday events and the local boys courted the girls from the city: the buxom lady in the striped bathing suit made her Binoculars keep a close eye on what is happening and check whether it is also civilized.
Even if young heroes still impress their audience with daring jumps from the jetty, many tourists are now looking for bigger attractions all over the world. If you spend a day at the lake in Obing, you don’t have anything exciting to post, but in the evening you are full of the warmth of the sun, softened by the water, a little tired from the beer and very relaxed. This great feeling of endless summer holidays, here it takes possession of adults again. Turn off your phone and don’t tell anyone.
Strandbad Obing, Seestraße 40, Obing. Open from 9am to 10pm.
