Chicken or beef?

So after an AWESOME tai chi lesson yesterday that actually made me realise just how pathetic my ankles are (we did something called a "Tai-chi walk" which had a lot of swivelling and lunging and then swivelling the other way) and how I've picked up bad habits already, I woke up not feeling the whole Pilates thing this morning. On the plus side besides my original four different Tai chi steps, I can totally turn corners now!

So anyway, I managed to force myself out of my lovely warm blanket-cocoon and dragged myself off to the 8m pilates class. It's cold at 8 in the morning, so we get to wear our socks instead of being barefoot! Last week the instructor told us to wear more interesting socks - my lumo-giraffe socks weren't even close to the coolness of his retina-blasting yellow and red toe socks.

So today we lined up in our stripy or polka-dot socks and got started. I love the instructor. Seriously, if I could compress him down to an mp3 and have him on my ipod, the world's depression problem would vanish! Besides being a walking ken-doll with every muscle imaginable around a waistline that's about as wide as of one of my socks, he's also incredibly INCREDIBLY camp and he likes to have 'girl talks' with us.

It makes clenching your stomach muscles while throwing your arms and legs around incredibly difficult when you find him amusing. The others don't seem to have a problem, and I've been able to hide my giggling enough that he thinks I have no core muscles and therefore no sense of balance, when actually I'm just falling over from laughing too hard!

For instance he started off this morning by telling us about the gelling agents used in ice-cream and how they are also used in the manufacture of rubber. And there I was thinking they used algae in ice-cream and rubber came from trees. Either way before I could get confused he pointed to his stomach and said "So if you have a spare-tyre..." And I fell over.

Later someone was struggling and he went to her and said:
"do you feel like you want to kotch**?" she nodded, trying to maintain her position, and he continued:
"You see ladies, if you eat your nice bowl on jungle oats before pilates you're going to be bloated. Jungle oats is such a good breakfast, lots of slow release energy. Yip it tastes like snot, but it's so good for you. But then it sits there and you can't use the muscles because you're just squishing the snot around."
The lady who had been struggling started turning kind of green. I had given up and I was sitting on my mat refusing to make eye contact with anyone.

One of the 'teacher's pet' types chirped up with "but then what do we eat?"
"you eat that snotty jungle oats! No ladies, I don't want to know what you had for breakfast, sardines on toast... yes that's high in protein! Do we have to discuss the difference between carbs and protein again?" (he did, but I won't go into detail because there;s no way I can do any kind of justice to a muscled-up ex-gymnast in a shiny yellow singlet acting out farming).

Teachers pet started again with "but that means we must eat our breakfast at six in the morning?"
"Yes Tracey, you eat at six, or you don't eat and you have breakfast an hour after you exercise. Eat a banana, do you like green-yellow or yellow-yellow bananas?" we all mumbled something to show that we were listening while Tracey sat up straight and said "Yellow-yellow!"
"Oh dear Tracey! You're on the way for a fat attack!"

Anyway after an hour of complete entertainment Ken-doll broke the news that he's leaving to become 'cabin-crew' for an airline. So sad!

And now I have to start teaching on Wednesday mornings so I'll have to find a different pilates class to go to. Sad times!


*** kotch is a delightful term for vomit