I fully intended to blog about the terrible thunderstorm that disturbed our sleep last night, or the weather in general, or the way that the discovery of oreo frappucinos in Jinotepe completely turned around my wrong-side-of-the bed day or our delicious dinner at a restaurant around the corner... but then we went to an aerobics class! You'll definitely be hearing about the amazing frapp and the weather, but not tonight.
Eve invited us to go my first week here and said she'd pick us up at six-thirty on Tuesday, but Nica time took over; the gym was closed for no apparent reason. We've managed to busy ourselves with all kinds of other things since then, but we made plans last Thursday to actually go for real tonight. Eve even showed up on time! We walked to the gym together so that we can get there on our own if we ever need to. Like pretty much everything we need to get to in Jinotepe, it's not even ten minutes away. I can't say I would have found it myself, though, because it's in a shopping mall beside some kind of arcade. In any case, we got there and only sat around for about ten minutes before it started. Apparently we were quite the sight because one guy who happened to be in the mall actually pulled out his camera and took a picture of Brianne, Eve, Jenny and me when he thought we weren't looking. I always make sure I check with people here before I take their photo and I'm glad I do because I felt like I was in a zoo!
The class began as most do, with a bunch of girls milling around awkwardly while the instructor set up. Unlike other classes I've been to, there's was no introductory spiel; instead, the guy leading the class sauntered into the front, started the music and jumped right into things! I don't know how he managed to lead a women's aerobics class and look so gangster doing it, but he did. We huffed and puffed to the beat of 80's remixes for a good forty minutes (with weights, even!) until we thought we might die and Jenny desperately announced "I'd rather be faaaaaaat" Things almost got worse after that and our complaints turned to "I can't daaaaance" when our instructor started some kind of complicated foot-shuffling, hip-wiggling, salsa-stepping routine! Again, he looked much cooler than we did - it was strange because at home, the instructor would have taken a lot more time to build up to more complicated steps, but here it's expected that you just know how to salsa. Still, we had a great time and we think we'll go back on the days when our morning run gets rained out.
When we got back to BaseCamp, there were a few little girls (aged ten, nine and two, they told us) playing in the doorway beside ours. Struck with an idea, Brianne asked them to wait just uno momento so she could go grab the bag of glowsticks her sister had sent for exactly this kind of occasion. It was really nice to see how excited they were about their glow-in-the-dark bracelets; the two-year-old's patience when Brianne was putting on her her glowstick necklace was even more priceless.
So despite waking up on entirely the wrong side of the bed (seriously, worst sleep ever), my day definitely turned around and I feel like we wound up having some pretty cool cultural experiences in some unexpected places!
No comments:
Post a Comment