After some initial research into gym memberships, we narrowed down the choices: hemmoraging $1000/year at the five-star Serena Hotel; subjecting ourselves to hot dog fumes, lonely marines and onion-style layers of security at the American Club; affiliating our vegetarian, kitten-saving selves with the Islamabad Hunt Club; pretending to work out on the UN Club's lone piece of cardio vascular equipment, a circa 1975 treadmill; or embracing sloth. My bout of culture shock hardly seemed the time to abandon my religious commitment to exercise, and so we set out to buy what Pakistanis call, in both Urdu and English, a running machine.
Sporting goods stores here do not sell running machines. Rather, they occupy nearly all the floor space in duty free shops -- 15-by-30 foot stalls otherwise crammed with imported dishes, luggage, crock pots, electric razors, stick-free cookware, battery-powered eyebrow shapers, and, most excitingly, a motorized bread trimmer called the SeaShrimp. We bought a treadmill after haggling at several of these stores.
A casuality of moving to Pakistan has been the dogs' excercise regimen -- until we taught Kenai to use the running machine. I think she finds it a little annoying, running toward the wall but never hitting it. And really, who doesn't?
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