After a year of workouts at the college, it was time to shell out the bucks for a fancy Dubai gym membership. It's not that I didn't give working out at the office a try. Our college gym, shared by the men's and women's campuses, does have a 50 meter pool (closed for repair since February) as well as a half dozen 1990's treadmills. But with my gym-junkie history, a facility with limited hours and dated equipment was just not doing it for me. My mental and physical fitness needs were not being met.
So I joined Fitness First, a gulf-wide chain of health clubs, with dozens of classes each week, the newest equipment, chilled outdoor pools, coffee bar, spinning studio and the perkiest fitness trainers from Egypt, India and the Phillipines. And as with many of our UAE adventures, the gym experience has been full of things that don't quite make sense.
In the ladies locker room are multilingual signs suggesting that we preserve our modesty, by changing behind curtains and covering our bodies with towels. But then there are the massive banks of TV monitors in exercise areas, where every fifth wide-screen is tuned into MTV World, where you're sure to see Madonna in crude gyration mode, or Shakira in flesh colored leotard, writhing as if having an exotic (erotic) dream.
Now I'm all for modesty and respecting the local norms, and I will admit that when the kids are not around, Billy and I tune into the old MTV to see how far behind we've fallen in our pop-culture hole. But I'd like to ask the gym managers if they don't think it's a little much to directly request our compliance with modesty code while showing the most immodest of offerings from satellite TV?
And if that's not enough, there's mid-day Friday - holy time for Muslims, when the route to the gym is clogged with mosque-goers rushing to make the holy hour and parking illegally all over the roads, roundabouts and medians. The gym is indeed a little quieter at this time. But what I just discovered is that if you do hop onto a treadmill, your TV options include not only the indecent videos of MTV, but also the Mosque TV channel, with bowing and praying traditionally-dressed Muslims in the mosque, directly next to the barely dressed dancers of MTV.
How funny and irreverent and religious and multicultural can the UAE manage to be?
I need only tear my eyes away from the the mosque TV and the MTV and direct them to the treadmill on my one side with a Muslim woman running with her hightech dry-fit headscarf, to the stinky German engineer on my other side with his hairy chest spilling out of a tank top. Maybe it's best to just stare out into space..
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5 comments:
Very interesting! I bet you wouldn't have found MTV at the school gym. I do have to say you could stare off to space or get video on your iPod, then you can catch up on the newest episode of Grey's while working out!
Religion had been filled with contradiction since the beginning of time... As you can see nothing has changed:) Use the time for quiet time... OF go to Fitness magazine and download some of the play lists from there.. You will feel better:) I on the other hand load up on Boston Legal reruns for the treadmill and OD on the one and only... Dennie Crane of Crane, Poole and Schmidt... BTW- I am not Schmidt! Or of course- the Wing... Where Martin Sheehan is still President:)
Last post was from me not Ann. She is still signed in on my computer:) HAHAH
Well, this is the real Ann Howicz and I was thinking how funny it would be if you had the picture in picture feature going on the TV. Then you could have MTV and Mosque all at once! I personally like to watch the queen of the daytime screen- Oprah- while one the trendmill.
You need a little trash at the gym--isn't that more motivating?
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