Parks & Recreation

Thank goodness for subsidized everything! Unlike most active New Yorkers, who prefer to pay an obscene $160 per month for a New York Sports Club membership, I've paid $75 for an entire year -- for a membership at the city's Parks & Recreation centers, which are located in all five boroughs. Many of the centers are designed for city students, and so are made up of nothing more than a gym and a ping pong room. A few of them are outfitted as "normal" gyms, complete with weight rooms, tracks, indoor pools, and cardio machines. The best ones even hold yoga and fitness classes (for free! the quality, however, I cannot yet vouch for). The only thing lacking from the centers are racquetball courts which, I now know, seem to be available only to wealthy, white men and their sons, at ludicrous $20 per hour rates and with membership-only exclusive privileges, yada yada yada. Oh well.

Today's public project was swimming, at the Chelsea Recreation Center. The pool was surprisingly clean, and the lanes were even divided into slow, medium, and fast (to help sort the old Chinese ladies from the fit foreigners, apparently). Experiencing an American indoor pool was surprisingly refreshing, as I had gotten accustomed to the chaotic free-for-all at my local Vosgien pool (i.e., no lanes, no division of ability, a generally communist sense of space). I did a decent number of laps, held my own in the fast lane, and bussed my way across town with a quiet sense of community pride. I'm starting to feel like I live here.