Bikram (or something like it)... finally

Being that Xiamen is a decently large city, I was able to find a small yoga studio down the street from my apartment that actually had Bikram yoga (yay!)... or so they advertise.

Bikram is a pretty specific kind of yoga— it's an hour and a half long series of 26 poses, each repeated twice. It's done in a hot, humid room, so sometimes hot yoga places will try to call themselves Bikram studios, but if it's not this specific series, it's not Bikram. So being able to find an actual Bikram class here was theoretically great, because even though I wouldn't understand the instructor, the series is the same so I'd still be able to do the class.

The studio is pretty cute, it has one studio with the requisite mirrored walls, save for an ocean scape on the fourth wall, and can only handle maybe ten practitioners per class, which I really like. This studio is a little different than the last time I took a yoga class at the gym; it isn't nearly as quiet and relaxing. Even though we do meditate sometimes, people talk and grunt and fart and laugh as they please. The room is actually really loud until class starts, and people come in late and leave early and answer their phones without a moment's pause.

After I found the place, I bought a yoga mat and a package of classes, got the class schedule and started showing up to the Bikram classes— and then I was just kind of confused. In the classes, it was usually obvious that the instructors had seen a Bikram video once or twice, or had some basic knowledge of it, but there were only maybe one or two Bikram poses in each session.

The classes were pretty funny though at first. There are two instructors that speak no English and seemed pretty worried to have me there (the third Bikram instructor was an environmental engineer or something cool like that in Seattle for like seven years, random). Basically, nobody else speaks English either, neither the front desk staff nor the other practitioners, so it's pretty much all a game of charades.

Once they figured out that I had some yoga background and was halfway decent at guessing what they meant when they called out positions and corrections, they relaxed a bit. If I'm not understanding something they'll usually stop walking around and demonstrate or just come over and fix me. They are not shy about touching practitioners... or climbing up on us and pulling on us with all their might.

There's one instructor that really beats on us, and she can't for the life of her understand that I'm not flexible in the same ways as Chinese people. She pushes me like nobody's business on positions that require hip or lower back flexibility and kill me, and then is really surprised when I can do backward bending positions or things that require shoulder flexibility better than her.

After I'd been going to classes for a few weeks, the front desk handed me a written note one day asking me to call two hours before I'm coming to a class, which made me laugh and lead to my biggest Chinese victory so far. I had a friend teach me how to make the call ("Hi, I'm the foreigner. I'm coming to yoga class at 6:15pm. Thanks."), and the first time I did it they understood me on my first try, no repeating; win!

Now, it turns out there's usually one or two people in class that speak a little English, so they will occasionally collectively ask me questions or say things to me. The first thing they usuaully comment on is my being an American and being skinny, which I never have a clue what to respond with.

I also found out that the classes I go to used to be straight Bikram, but the Chinese complained, they think it's too boring and repetitive. I guess I understand that, and even though it bums me out, I'm still happy to be able to get some kind of work out there.