I might as well be deaf

It has only taken me four months, but I finally worked up the courage to take a class at our gym. This might not seem like that big of a deal, but you have to remember that all of the classes are in French. When we joined the gym they said I could tell the instructor that I only spoke English and they would then teach a little of the class in English to help me out. But I didn't want to be the person that gets singled out from the entire rest of the class as the dumb American. So I just did my best to act confident and pretend that I knew what was going on. Luckily my mother has taught me well that when in doubt, just watch what everyone else is doing and and follow their lead.

I decided to go to a yoga class for my first attempt. I figured that I had taken yoga before and that the movements would be somewhat familiar. However, it is hard to relax like you are supposed to in yoga when you are straining to understand just one word from the instructor. Basically all I got from her was "breathe", but I never knew whether it was supposed to be in or out. Luckily, I happened to place myself near the worst person in the class, so I at least looked better than him.

Since I had finally faced my fear and taken a class, I decided to run with it and I took Body Pump the next day. Body Pump is where you life weights while also doing lunges, sit ups etc. There were a few people who raised their hands when the instructor asked if anyone was new, so I just followed the amount of weights she told them to use.

The funniest part of the Body Pump class was when the teacher would throw in an English word or two. Its seems that when someone says an English word in the middle of all French words, it somehow comes out sounding like it was said with a German accent. So as we are lifting weights I would suddenly hear, "Pump it!" or "Don't Stop!" but it sounded a lot more like Arnold Schwarzenegger saying it than a French woman.

My next class was Body Attack. This class seemed a lot more like my high school cheerleading practices than anything else. We were doing the craziest jumps and skips all throughout the class. The worst was when we kept having to put our arms up into a V above our heads. I got views of more hairy female armpits than I have ever seen, or care to see again. Since I kind of just zone out the instructor, I was caught off guard when I was looking down and apparently he told the class to run in a big circle. All of the sudden I look up to see 20 sweaty Europeans running towards me. Talk about a deer in headlights!

Again, I was luckily not the dumbest person in the class. This award went a blonde woman who, when she didn't want to keep doing the pushups, just sat back on her legs and wiggled her upper body to the music with a ditzy looking smile on her face. The worst was when we were jumping up and down in a circle (so all facing each other). Her chest must have been hurting her so she just put both hands smack dab over her boobs and kept on jumping.