Swimming in the sea

There was a new jump tower that was finished just in time for this years bathing season.

From my parents' summer house it is about a 10 minutes walk to the sea. In Sweden we don't really have beaches (there are some, but it is not so common), we just jump into the sea straight off of a cliff, usually. I tried to convince my Japanese friend that we should go swimming, but she thought it looked too cold. My brother's girlfriend did not help by saying: "Only crazy people ever go swimming in Sweden". She thinks that if the sum of the air temperature and the water temperature is not over 50 (Celsius scale) it is too cold; and this will probably never happen in Sweden. Swedish standards are more along the lines of "If the water is 15 degrees Celsius, of course we should swim!"

This year, the sea was unusually hot and people told me it was 19 degrees Celsius. This is very rare (though the lakes get much warmer, the sea rarely comes close to 20 degrees). I tried to point out that normal looking people like the man in the photo were swimming, so not "only crazy people", and that since my mother swam in the sea with me they were implying that she was crazy... but apparently Japanese people have some super power making them impervious to logic. So only me and my mother swam in the sea.