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04/27/13
Body Jam
Filed under: General, Culture
Posted by: @ 7:32 am


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Health
Clubs are a new phenomenon in Kunming (exactly why someone who spends their day
hauling bales of hay on their back feels the need to work out after they punch
out, I’ll never know). But I got a club membership at the cat’s meow of health
clubs.


It’s
located in a shopping center with all of the franchises that made Americans
fat: McDonald’s, KFC, DQ, Pizza Hut, Haagan Daz.

The club has more than hula hoops and jumping ropes.


Imagine Chicago’s East Bank
Club
without toilets, but pristine Kohler squatties instead. However, Oprah
and her twelve body guards don’t work out here. 

It offers me  a piece of sanity  for a few sweaty hours each week.  I 
forget that I’m in a country where it’s OK to drive on the side walk  and wear your pajamas in public.


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068


Or
where the pharmacists prescribe horny goat weed or cows’ gallstones.


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036


The
health club is huge, with private training rooms, a women’s gym, co-ed work-out
room, a smorgasbord of classes, various life cycles each with its own
individual TV offering
 CNN and BBC.
Getting thirty minutes of western news is incentive enough to jiggle it off at
the gym.

And
yes, it has cliché members: the steroid junkie with
  biceps bigger than his head, the rich wife
dripping in jade in a pink sweat
suit. And now, the token white member. Me.


I
decided to attend a Body Jam class for the sole reason that it featured
 American music. The instructor reminded me of
a Chinese Billy Blanks: gobs of energy packed into a little bitty bit of
spandex. He knew a few commands in English: Left, Right, OK, and Excellent!


Now
those of you who know me, know that I trip over my own shadow. Still, the Chinese women who attended the class thought
that I must know what I was doing since I was from the west where aerobics and
health club fashion was invented. Body Jam turned into Chinese Twister.


I
was skidding around like thumper on ice to Taylor Swift tunes, the fake wood floors supplying no
traction to my non-bootleg Nikes. Other attendees,
 not wanting to lose face or break face, just watched. The instructor gave up, just having us
march  in place fifty five minutes, waving
our arms like Marcia and Greg Brady’s  Sunshine Day song and dance routine.


I
don’t know if I burned off the DQ Blizzard I had prior to attending class, but I
survived and will be back for another class.


But
not on Wednesdays. That’s belly dancing.


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