Alex's Gym

Natasha and I worked out today for the first time at Alex's Gym, a rather amazing establishment near my apartment. We went yesterday to ask about passes and see the place- Alex himself, who actually goes by Sasha as he is of course Russian, came out to the desk and met us. He looked at us in confustion for a new seconds, then said, with an air of triumphant comprehension, "Foreigners!" "Um, Da," we said. There then followed a most excellent conversation, in very cheerful but ungrammatical English on his part and probably equally ungrammatical Russian on our part. He would point to a machine and say, "You put your arms!! You put your legs!! Make shaped!!" We did a lot of smiling and nodding. So we went back today, greeted our new friends- Sasha, or course, and Iulia the receptionist, and the one-handed workman, another Sasha- changed, and entered the tiny gym. Someone had very sincerely and carefully painted Roman chariot racers and centaurs with bows and Medusa-heads on the wall, plus some random greek columns in empty spaces. And then there were a lot of pictures of body-builders, and of naked women selling sun-tanning products. There was one treadmill, of which the lowest level of resistance is approximately equal to running up Chipman Hill. Well, maybe not quite that hard, as I managed to use it in 10-minute intervals, which I certainly could not manage on Chipman's. I got better at it as I went along, and discovered that gripping the handles in front and running in an almost horizontal position helped matters. But I will not be doing any distance runs on it. For a long time Natasha and I were the only ones in the gym, but after a while some skinny Russian boys in short shorts and funny shoes came in and did odd, very fast calisthenics. Their whole manner was so different from the Middlebury football players I'm accostomed to always seeing in the gym; I have not really gotten used to the Russian conception of masculinity, which is very important to them but hard to predict. Men cannot eat chocolate, for instance- Nestle even sells a special chocolate bar called "Chocolate for Men," with pictures of women with lines through them on every little square (when the boys in our group bought this chocolate the saleswomen still laughed at them though)- but it seems to be perfectly acceptable to carry a purse. Back to the gym, aside from the treadmill there was a stationary bike, and normal weight machines, and it felt very good to excercise after so long. Plus I can have the cheering sight of Alex every day, striding about looking like a stereotype of a Finnish bodybuilder, with the mustache and everything, striding boucingly about the place.