Fits and Starts

It's called Holmes Place.  It's a bit too mainstream for my tastes, but it is conveniently located 2 blocks from home.  I had tried to find something like my Jazzercise studio in Royal Oak, MI here, but they don't have fitness center's dedicated to aerobic dance.  They have dance studios (I found one that had a lot of class options, but it's a 40 minute walk from home, most of the classes were after 8pm, and they wanted about $15 per 1 hour class, which at 3x/week gets expensive).  The alternative I found in Tel Aviv is aerobic dance classes offered at some of the gyms, like Holmes Place.  So zumba and energy dance at the gym it is for me.  Since I have the membership now, I'm planning to try out other classes too, just for balance and curiosity, like yoga, pilates, and maybe belly dancing.  When in the middle east, right? 

Getting my membership began with the usual thinly veiled hard sell from a gym rep.  They called relentlessly to follow up.  And I hmm'd and haa'd over it until I got them to eliminate the registration fee (about $100), lower the early cancellation fee (from $100 to about $50), and take my payments in two installments (whereby I gave them a temporary limited credit card # on the first payment, so I'm really not locked into the one year contract if I don't want to be).  Now they call me regularly but don't leave messages.  And they text me in Hebrew (which I can read about 1/10th of - I thought that was pretty impressive).  However, I discovered the hard way, when I showed up for my "free" nutritionist appointment earlier this week (that unbenounced to me, was cancelled), that the rep who sold me the membership forgot to write "English" on my file, which explains some of the miscommunication. 

As with everything around here, I don't fit the mold, so anything new comes in fits and starts.