What a difference a day makes...

A gym like the one in my hotel

Asian kids are cute. But they don't add much value in the weight room.

As I was walking home from work this evening, I was thinking about how I didn't have a single funny or horrible thing happen to me today...and wondering when I would have something worth blogging about again. I decided to go work out to deal with the man problems I have mentioned in previous posts, and was delighted to have another hilarious experience.

So I walk into the gym at my hotel, which is small, crappy, and lined with a glass wall. There is an old asian woman playing with a small asian girl like the one pictured above. As I walk in, the lady tells the girl to say "hello", which was very cute. When I was loading up weight on the bench, I noticed they were walking right over toward the bench (to the point where I had to wait for them to move to put weights on the bar). A little weirded out, I decided to move on. As I started into my set with 225 lbs on the bar, I hear these noises coming from the lady who is now sitting about 3 feet behind me:

"Yi
Er
San
Tsu
Wu
Leo..."

At this point I nearly drop the bar on my own chest, because I started laughing out loud. She was counting my reps...saying 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 in chinese. I then moved on to another machine, where they set up beside me and did the same thing. At this point, a man comes in from the front desk and tells the lady she cannot follow me around while I'm working out...she leaves, and they close the glass doors.

I was lamenting the uneventful ending of this story, but fortunately it was not over. After a couple more sets, I see the woman and the child walking down the hallway outside the gym (remember the gym is enclosed by glass walls). I am now doing an ab exercise on a bench about 1 foot from the glass wall. The lady points at me, and her and the child run up to the glass, with the child pressing her face to the glass between her hands, and they excitedly watched me like an animal in the zoo! Again, I was laughing very hard and had to cut my set short. They watched the rest of my work out, and then rode the elevator up with me as I went back to my room.

I wish someone had been with me to experience this, because it was the funniest thing that has happened to me in China thus far. Although I had a miserable work out (you try lifting weights with an old woman and a child standing or sitting within 2 feet of you, with those small hands just waiting to touch ya), it was worthy of yet another blog entry.


*Note: To keep this blog truthful, I must divulge that I may or may not have had 225 on the bar. I will admit that I was benching between 45 and 275 pounds, but the story is more exciting with a big # on the bar. Lying is manly. Get over it.

*Additional note: for those of you who are wondering, normally I would ask to use the child for additional resistance during my excercises. Baby tossing is great excercise. However, I did not know how to ask this lady how to throw her baby in Chinese. I will find out tonight in case I have another opportunity.

*Final note: looking good is hard work. Don't think I take it lightly, or just lucked into the chiseled machine I am today. I put my time in...