Jungle Yoga

If there’s one thing I have learned so far while here in Guatemala, it’s that if you wait long enough, pretty much anything you could want will show up here.  Last year, when I was living in the little hut, I wanted to buy a squeegee. I went to a number of stores, showing people a picture of what I wanted, but couldn’t find one.  Fast forward one year, and they are everywhere.  Earlier this year, I needed to buy a couple cheap bookshelves.  I went to the store that I call the Guatemalan Wal-Mart, but they didn’t have any.  Two weeks later, they had a ton of them.  Patience and flexibility definitely help out here.

One thing I hadn’t been able to find was some type of workout routine that worked for me.  In San Francisco I dance and do yoga trapeze.  I have the capability to both at my Guatemala home (and I do), but there is something about being with other people when you work out that I like.  My dance and yoga sisters in San Francisco have become great friends and we always cheer each other on.

I have been hoping to find something like that here in Guatemala.

Some of the area hotels and resorts offer yoga, and there are a couple private yoga instructors, but there hadn’t been a regular yoga class…until now.  The local library recently moved into a new, much larger building and one of my friends, who is a yoga instructor, just started offering classes at the library twice a week.  I went today for the first time.  The class was small – just me and one other woman – which was great, since I hadn’t been to a regular yoga class in a while.  Let me tell you, Hot Yoga has nothing on what I’m calling “Jungle Yoga!”  In Jungle Yoga, we have the same heat and the humidity that there is in Hot Yoga, but we get this naturally while we do yoga outside and watch the toucans in the trees. Did I mention that the class was in Spanish? I was pretty proud of myself: I was able to understand most of the instructions!

I’m going back again for the next class. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.