It Will "Work Out"

When I first came to Jiaxing, I learned that my school is part of a larger company. The company wants to turn the area around my school into its own self sufficient town with a school, grocery store, farms, and apartments. Right now the school and apartments are done and there are a few farms that grow vegetables and the last thing they have is a gym.
Right away my co-workers and I were given a tour of the gym and then we were asked if we wanted to sign up. Here is the thing, there is a gym literally across from where I live and the company gym is about a 10 minute drive. It seemed obvious which gym I would go to but there was a hurdle. How could I train if I suck at the language? My "small" town does not have a lot of English speakers in it, so could I take gym classes or have a trainer effectivly?
The answer was yes!

Right now I am a member of In Fitness Gym and the rate for a year was 2,000 RMB which is about 285 USD. Not bad. The gym offers bellydance (I take that twice a week), yoga, pilates, jazz, spinning, and access to the weights, treadmills, and a boxing ring complete with sandbag and gloves.
When I was in college I was a member of BAD which stood for Bobcat Arnis Defense Club where I first learned MMA boxing and loved it. I got bruises and little cuts on my knuckles, punched stuff, and got a really great workout. I asked this gym for a personal trainer for boxing and it was pricey. It was around 10,000 RMB for 32 classes which is 1,428 USD which was more than my gym membership!
If you ever get a personal trainer in China know that many will charge that much. I talked to many people before agreeing to pay for my boxing coach and they all said it was about that much at different gyms.
I paid for this because I really did want to do boxing again and my money was not going to go to anything else so why not. Just for perspective I get paid 18,000 RMB a month here and only spend about 8,000 RMB a month. I have quite a bit in savings. (Please do not rob me.)

First the gym paired me up with Robert (no relation to my father of the same name) who is probably the best English speaker the gym had. He would be in charge of translation if needed and if I wanted to do other training like general fitness. Then I met Yao who was my boxing coach. He spoke no English when we first met. However, through the power of smart phones and a translating app called YouDao Translator we could communicate when Robert was not there.
My bellydance teacher, Ting Ting, speaks zero English but she shows the class what to do with her body and we mimic. While she can explain to everyone else what muscels are being used and what moves are called and I sit there like a bump on an ignorant log, I can still generally get the moves down correctly by watching.

One last thing to know about Chinese gyms and Chinese culture overall is there is no such thing as personal space. Teachers will touch you and put their arms around you and it is deeply uncomfortable for someone like me. My bellydance coach once grabbed the sides of my hips from behind and pushed them side to side to help correct my form. I let out a little scream and it threw off the entire class for a second. In the West, teachers and coaches and whoever else in a professional setting are never supposed to touch the client and only allowed to give verbal instruction. My friend, Camden Grasmick, who was my personal trainer at one point, told me this along with my former boxing coach, Dr. Darrin Coe. My co-worker, Angel, who goes to bellydance with me, let me know that it is very common here for coaches to touch their clients. The reason Angel did not get a personal trainer was because they had no female trainers left and she was uncomfortable with a man. I do not blame her.
Overtime, I have gotten used to the touching more and more. My coaches do know now that they have to let me know if they are going to touch me because of my uncomfortableness and I give them permission to do so.

If you come overseas and want to work out, know that you can workout here okay even with the language barrier. Also, let them know if you are uncomfortable with touch. If they won't respect your wishes then go to a gym that does. They want your business so they will assist you!

I Came To Catch Flights...Not Feelings

Before moving to China one of the top five questions I got was, "What if you meet someone over there and fall in love?" Now that I am in China the number one question I get is, "What if you meet someone here and fall in love?" Often times this question is followed by a story about how they knew a Westerner who fell in love with a Chinese person and it is all roses and sunshine. While I think it would be really cool if that did happen to me let me address a few things that kind of put the "fall in love in a foreign country" in a more realistic situation.

The first is that I am not good at speaking Chinese so the person I would meet would have to be good in English. Or I would really have to get good at Chinese fast.
This is possible but when you live in "smaller" areas that can be hard to find. My city is considered small and it is 4 million people. The only people I have met that speak English fluently work in my bilingual school. Shanghai or Beijing would have more English speakers.
It also takes 5 years of living in a country to be considered fluent according to psychologists who have studied language acquisition.

Two is that I have no idea what dating culture is like here. Is it okay to hold hands on the first date? Is a movie and dinner a normal date here? What are taboo subjects I should avoid? To add on to this I noticed that PDA (public displays of affection) are rampant here. People hold hands, hug, and make out on sidewalks, elevators, escalators, and in front of the sock display at the mall. (I just want socks. Get out of my way, lovebirds!) I am super duper uncomfortable with PDA so that adds another layer of why dating here would be hard.

Three, let us say that I do meet the right person. We are truly in love! Now we are going to get married but there is a catch...a big one. You can not be a dual citizen of China. That means one of us would have to give up their nationality to be with the other person and we would have to choose a country to live in. For instance, I could stop being American, marry my Chinese husband, get my Chinese citizenship, and live in China forever and then have to apply for travel visas to America to visit friends and family OR my husband would have to do vice versa. Would one of us be willing to give up our citizenship for the other? I know I will not give up mine.
The other option is that we could keep our citizenships but that means we have to keep applying for work visas to be with one another. Let us say I stay in China with my Chinese husband and keep my teaching job here. Even though we are married I would have to keep applying for a work visa to legally stay in China with him. If he were to move to America, he would have to do the same.
If we are really in love we can do these options but it is asking a lot of the other person and that is not even counting the other difficult parts of being in a relationship such as family, religion, money, or politics.

So while being in love in China sounds romantic and awesome there can be a lot complications with it as well. I also low-key wonder if men get this marriage question as much as I am getting right now. Not to mention the reason I came to China was to have a life changing experience and learn a different culture...not to fall in love.

As I read on twitter once, "I want to catch flights, not feels."