Aerobics in Angola

Staying fit in Angola is no easy task. Walking is too dangerous in the dark in most places and even in the day time you need to watch out for pot holes, random waist high puddles and scooters who aim at pedestrians like ten pins at a bowling alley.

With this in mind I decided to join a gym. At one gym I was welcomed by being casually saluted by a muscular man with gold teeth in military attire, his chair reclined back and his huge army boots on the desk in front of me. Making my way up to the gym itself, past an equally muscular man, again in military attire doing lunges up the stairs, I wondered if I had accidentally stumbled on a military training camp.

Looking around at the body builders, each at lest twice the size of me, I chuckled at the thought of a skinny but very out of shape white girl chatting to hulks of men, tattooed muscles bursting out of their wife beater style vests. As friendly as the men all turned out to be, I could help but think I did not really fit in.

The next gym I visited had an equally high number of no nonsense body builder cum street combat types, but was also dotted with the odd flabby expat. After a brief wander around the exercise cum torture equipment I went to stretch out, yoga style. Again I chuckled away, doing my sun salutations beside giants lifting weights of equally immense proportions. It seemed I would need more than protein shake to ever reach even half of their muscle ratio.

About to relax from a final stretch, I found I could not get up. It turned out it was because one of the instructors was on top of me and decided a sports massage was just what I needed. Hearing my bones cracking away, I lifted my head as much as possible to se if sports massages were the norm here. In any case I was not going to argue with a man double my size and strength, and besides in a body lock, I could not move.

Whilst I admit that my body felt incredibly light after this retuning, seeing that sports massages were the norm and were being offered, or rather enforced, on other clients was a greater relief.

The next day I opted for the aerobics class, and kept enough energy to make a very swift exit before anyone could sit on me.