Gymmercizing

In New York I was apart of a gym that was $70 for the year. It had an indoor track, brand new(ish) equipment, a pool, basketball courts, locker rooms, very clean, and never busy. They were all over the city as part of the City Parks Foundation Recreation Centers. It had crappy hours 6am-9:30pm M-F and then 12-4 on Saturday, closed on Sunday. However, it was a block away from my apartment and I swore I would never find as good a deal on a gym ever again.

After I got my first paycheck in October, the first thing I did was to go sign up for the gym that every foreigner here seemed to belong to. Prime Fitness - a gym on the top floor (7th) of a building that also houses one of our local bars. It's a gorgeous gym... big windows that overlook the main downtown area of Suji, and treadmills that line the whole front part of the building. It's very bright, dark wood floors, and red accents everywhere so its looks state of the art. It's not very big, but it gets the job done. Free weights are in the back in a room that when it rains, it actually rains in the gym itself, and nautlius machines are in the main room. The locker rooms are really nice (at least the women's are) with big individual showers behind thick frosted glass (that I'll probably never use). You walk in, and the really nice guy at the counter who's pretty fluent in English hands you a key for a locker and you take your paper stub out of a list on the wall and put it into a machine so it can punch the fact that you've been there - it reminds me of an old factory clocking in and clocking out or something.

All in all, its a great way to spend an hour or two after work at the low, low, price of 70,000W for 3 months (or 280,000 fo the year). And it's basically social hour in there, and if you don't go on a Friday night, you may not know what the plan is for the rest of the evening. So if you're in or around Suji - I recommend it.