Monday, June 7, 2010

A trip to the gym

Monday morning, I took a trip to the gym. This story, like most trip-to-the-gym-stories — an understandably small subgenre of the expository form — actually begins a day prior, when I spent four hours in a six-hour span strictly eating things that looked light brown and crispy. I woke up Monday morning, then, with grease and duck fat pumping through my veins, thinking it might be a good time to sweat a little.

Since I last wrote, I’ve been reasonably busy. I’ve done several things that felt like 75-percent of a worthwhile blog post. I visited the Meiji Shrine, a nearby landmark with its own official English Web site. I continued my apartment-hunting. I started planning a reporting trip (for later this week) to Okinawa. Also somewhere in these last few days, coinciding with presumptions of my craziness, I developed the distinct suspicion that 1.) Japanese water smells different than American water, and that 2.) I now smell like Japanese water, and that 3.) when I go to the gym, my sweat smells like Japanese sweat. My diet might have some influence here, too, but that’s a story for another paragraph.

So let’s get on with another paragraph. Sunday turned out to be a good day, dedicated to social contact, fried food and a 10-year reduction of my life expectancy. For lunch, which actually lasted almost until dinner, I met up with two new friends — a local AP reporter and a British ex-pat who writes for a tech magazine. Together, we took a pilgrimage to a restaurant famous for tonkatsu, a Japanese-specialty — pork cutlet bathed in panko breadcrumbs and oil. The food was as grand as the company. I returned to my hotel at 4 p.m., spent two hours recovering oxygen flow, and promptly joined Washington Post colleague Blaine Harden for dinner. He’s an amazing journalist, and he spent much of the evening offering sage advice, starting even with his first suggestion, which had to do with dinner plans. He suggested that we head out for Peking duck.

Now, Monday morning.

Just about first thing after sunrise, I headed to a fitness center up the street from my hotel. My goal: Explain to the person at the front desk that I wanted to use the gym just once, and was willing to pay a small fee.

In the U.S., particularly while traveling the country as a baseball writer, I made these sort of transactions a habit, and never once did they amount to even 75-percent of a blog post. But in a place with a language barrier, every tiny exchange carries the sick, wonderful potential for disaster. There’s always a chance to you’ll wind up doing something abhorrently inappropriate. There’s also a chance you’ll figure it out, that you’ll do it right, and you’ll be proud and your heart will be pumping.

There’s an addictive joy in this, and I’m its junky.

Also sometimes its victim.

The fitness center straddled the 9th, 10th and 11th floor of a tall office building. When the elevator doors swung open, shooting me toward the gym welcome desk, I did something bold and stupid. I took out my iPhone and created a voice recording, just as a way to document what happens when one member of a conversation has the verbal skills of a toddler.

Please, have a listen.



You’ll notice that the conversation starts out fine enough, so long as we’re not deducting points for grammar. In polite Japanese, I say good morning. Then I make the requisite statement that my Japanese skills suck. (Girl at desk managed a smile.) Then, haltingly, I explain my life story. I tell her that I arrived last week in Japan. Lacking the capacity, I don’t explain why. I then hit her with two questions: First, if it’s possible to use the gym just once. And second, how much that might cost. We’re 21 seconds into this exchange, and it’s all good.

Then she mentioned the cost for one-time gym usage: Y 3,000.

You’ll notice that I twice recite the stated price, and that’s because my brain still moves slowly when converting phonetic sound into understanding. About five seconds after she explained the price, I realized that this one gym trip was about to cost me, roughly, $32.87. Which is not exactly a bargain, no matter how much duck fat you can sweat.

Given the freedom of English — at a Gold’s Gym in, say, Dallas — I would have hereby expressed my dismay with the asking price, and maybe tried some good-natured empathy to bargain for a deal. Maybe I would have backed out entirely, opting instead for a run around the city. But now that I’m in Japan, some decisions just get made for me. I’m fine with conversations that lead to a goal, but I’m not quite equipped for on-the-fly adjustments. So oh well. I handed her the bills.

Once I turned the voice recorder off, things only devolved. Turns out, Japanese gyms (or at least this one) don’t let you just walk in with any ol’ pair of shoes. They require all occupants to wear unsullied, never-touched-the-concrete “indoor shoes,” and just by chance rentals are available for an extra Y 300. Frankly, the poor gym girl from the welcome desk spent so much time trying to explain this to me, she probably deserved even more. After about two minutes of fitful measuring and calculating, we determined my Japanese shoe size (28) and uncovered a proper pair of snow-white New Balances. I was up to code.

So that’s the story of my trip to the gym. It was a thrill, and it was sort of educational, but in retrospect it was also a defeat. I paid $32.87, and all I got in return was a 60-minute workout, plus an unfortunate lesson that even gyms on this side of the ocean play Hoobastank music.

2 comments:

  1. I thought your Japanese sounded great!

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  2. I agree. If your Japanese skills compare to a 3 year old like you say, that's a pretty elaborate conversation.

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