Free Membership

In graduate school, I went to the gym every morning to lift weights.  Then if I didn't have rugby practice, in the evenings, I would often be at the gym wearing nerdy white shoes playing squash.  Then I joined Peace Corps and it has been five years since I have been able to go to a gym.

In Africa, I tried to use buckets of water, bricks, and other things to create a homemade weight room, but it just never really interested me like going to a gym.  When I first arrived in my Chinese city, I tried to find a gym.  I found one place where all the weights were shoved into a corner with cobwebs.  Then as the city grew, as more fast food chicken restaurants, coffee shops, and pizza joints opened, yoga classes and gyms also started popping up; however, they were expensive, about 1/3rd of my living allowance per month.  I couldn't afford to go to the gym.

Guess what!

Today I got a free membership to a new gym in town.  

It is awesome!  

I am ecstatic!  

There are tons of free weights and machines.  They also have evening classes that I can attend for free:  yoga, spinning, kickboxing, belly dancing, step aerobics, core training, and jazz dance.  I am so excited.  Today I went to the gym twice, once for weight lifting and the second time for a yoga class.  In the weight room, I felt super macho as many of the puny guys were lifting half of what I used to be able to lift back in Seattle.  In the yoga class, I felt huge, a chest of muscle, compared to the tiny narrow wasted, flat, skinny armed women.  I don't care though!  I am SOOOO happy to have received a free gym membership.