My New Home Away From Home

Recently, I joined a gym which by no means is a New Year’s Resolution! The gym is actually in the same apartment complex that I live in, but I never knew it was there. After a friend told me about it, I chose to go gym hunting with my roommate (with only 6 months left, it’s the best time to get a membership as gyms only do by the year or 6^th months). We looked at 3 different gyms, and this one was the cheapest and has a pool – I’m a little bit of a water baby. I slept on the idea of spending a decent chunk of money on a gym and decided that it was time to do something besides watch Netflix in my free time.

The main reason that I decided to join the gym was because I love challenges. Now, most people think of challenges when it comes to gyms as challenging themselves to reach certain physical goals. My challenge is being able to understand what these people are trying to say to me. The workers at this gym speak ZERO English. Okay, I take that back. They can say “Hello!” and love to do that whenever they see me, but besides that, I have to resort to using my Chinese. After I paid, they introduced me to my personal trainer, which took me a while to have me understand who exactly she was. Then, she starts talking to me in such a soft hushed voice that’s going a mile a minute (I’m assuming she’s explaining how she can help me). All these new vocabulary words and situations gives me so many more opportunities to learn and practice my Chinese which ultimately made my decision to join the gym.

The first day of working out, I had to go swimming. Swimming just relaxes me, it’s such a good workout, it’s not necessarily too challenging, it reminds me of being a kid, need I go on? So I throw on my bikini and the next thing I know all of the other swimmers at 9:30 am are old Chinese men who just happen to only wear speedos. They were shocked to see a foreigner join them as we all swim laps, but that didn’t stop me, nor will it ever. I plan on going back tomorrow and swim a few laps as they continue to stare.

The aspect of this gym that is the hardest for me to handle is the confidence people have when they are naked within the locker room. Don’t get me wrong, I am confident with my body, almost too much so if you ask my mother. However, there is a point where it’s too much. These ladies like to stroll around and chat to each other completely in the nude. This is something that I will need to work on being accustomed to.

Finally, this gym offers free classes each day. Unfortunately with my work hours I cannot make it to most of them but on my two off days, I’ve decided to attend at least 2 classes. Today was my first. I went to spinning class. I’ve never done this before. It’s where you are on a stationary bike which you can adjust the resistance for. The teacher plays some music and then leads you through the workout by varying the resistance, sitting versus standing, bouncing to the beat, etc. Let’s just say, I will be going back to this every single week! I have never had so much fun working out before. Tomorrow I will be trying a yoga and belly dancing class. I will let you know how that goes.

Next time, I will get some pictures and post them so you all can see what my new home away from home looks like.