Being a Bikram yogi is kind of like being a Jew: your practice is the same no matter where you go.
I climbed the stairs up to the studio - which compared to New York and even CT is incredibly spacious - and immediately felt home. There's an entire lobby area for checking in before you enter the big red sauna with mirros lining that walls on THREE SIDES. GENIUS! There's also a little Zen sitting area up the stairs and opposite the locker rooms.
My instructor's name was Isabel. She was fantastic. The class was a great review for my "Body" vocab. Hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, chest, thumbs. You name it, we used it.
I actually understood everything she said and I loved how the English names of the postures translate so well to Spanish. Halfmoon pose: medialuna. Full locust (airplane): avion. Eagle: aguila. She kept driving us to "empuje, Empuje, EMPUJE...cambio" and "estire, EStire, ESTIRE...cambio."
Fall back, more back, way back just turned into "mas atras, mas atras, mas atras."
Even though Buenos Aires is incredibly humid as a city, the room was bearable and I had a great class. I think it's just because my adrenaline was up I was SO excited to a take a class in Spanish.
After class I met the director, who is American. His name is Jay, hehe. He and his wife went to training about 9 or 10 years ago and were living in Dallas and wanted to open a studio. They moved to Buenos Aires specifically to open a studio. Caveat: Jay's wife is Chilean so they were going to open up in Santiago, but there was already competition there. So they picked Buenos Aires simply so they could be the only ones. Yogis crack me up. I think "yogi" probably means healthy vagabond in another language.
This was especially evident when I added my little pushpin to the map on the wall. WOOHOO! I made my mark.
Namaste
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