New Year's Resolution

I’m not a gym kind of guy. Never have been. In the past my exercise came from a fairly active lifestyle and a lot of golf plus I have always loved to swim and play badminton. However, Indonesians see nothing wrong with calling someone fat, in fact Chinese Indonesians take this as a compliment reflecting their financial status which allows them to buy so much food. So when students recently started to refer to me as fat in adjective description exercises in class I decided to take action.

Yohana’s membership with Gold’s Gym was coming to an end and she’d heard about a new place that had opened called The Springs Club. Now let me tell you this is not just a gym, this place is huge. Not only is there an outdoor, olympic-sized swimming pool with an adjacent kids pool and four hot water jacuzzis next to it, inside they have a fully equipped gymnasium, a room for classes such as yoga, MMA and such like. On top of this they have four indoor tennis courts, eight indoor badminton courts, a squash court that can alternatively hold two table tennis tables, a basketball court and futsal pitch. The changing rooms have hot and cold plunge pools to go with the saunas as well as personalised lockers and power showers.  Finally there is a downstairs restaurant and an upstairs cafe. Admittedly they serve the same menu and it would be nice if the cafe were just that and the restaurant a bit more elaborate, but it’s all well cooked and presented if not particularly healthy.  Oh I should also add that Indonesia’s fascination with karaoke has ensured that there are two karaoke rooms that we can use one hour per day....for free. So after all of that exercise you can sing your heart out for an hour too!

There are currently about 300 members paying a variety of subscriptions. We chose the husband and wife package which gets us six months membership for Rp5,500,000 (aproximately £300) and we also get personalised parking passes, a free polo shirt each but only one gym bag which was weird when it’s a two person package.

Mornings are particularly busy and then the housewives descend on the place for an hour but there have bveen times when i’m the only person here and Indonesians vampire-like fear of the sun ensures it’s a private olympic-sized pool for much of the time!