Association Club Royal

As I have previously mentioned, I am a proud owner of a gym membership to Association Club Royal.  This lovely establishment requires me to pay $25 a month for unlimited cardio machine usage and special womens aerobic and belly dancing courses three days a week.  It may be a steal, but there are pros and cons to every good deal.

The Pros:
1) Women are allowed to work out during any open hours, (that would be 7am-9pm all days except for Sunday, which is 7am-12), and there are special hours which are "women only" on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday from open until 9pm.
2) There really aren't any regulations about sports wear within the gym.  You can wear what you are comfortable in, whether that is biking shorts or sweat pants.

3) For many of us this is the only location of stress-free showering.  Not only are you naked in a relatively secluded area (there aren't curtains on some of the stalls, but no one will enter into a stall with someone in it), there is also hot water.  The hot water phenomenon will be something we recover from soon enough, but most of us don't know how to turn the water heaters on in our homes and it is hard to find an appropriate time to shower.  We are probably making it a lot more complicated than it needs to be because of our language barriers, but hot water has become a hot topic of conversation between the students here.
4) The staff is really willing to help and some of them have become friends with our little group of workout-a-holics.  In particular, they will try to pull you into aerobics classes and make you laugh.  Laughter is always a good thing to incorporate into your exercise.

The Cons:
1) There is a lot of staff at the gym and most of the time they just sorta stare at you while you are exercising.  No Moroccan women have yet been seen on the elliptical machines or the bikes.  Sometimes they rush over and try to get a machine working for you that is in English, but they don't speak English.  Today I actually had the boxing teacher decide to be my personal trainer and he kicked my butt with boxing exercises.  It was very funny and exhausting and for the first time I didn't mind being bothered at the gym.
2) As I have mentioned before, the toilets are squatty pottys.  Enough said.

This is the actual toilet in the gym.  I
happened to be there alone today,
so I was able to take a picture.

3) No one wipes down the machines.  I don't feel that many people use the cardio machines except for us girls, but we get very sweaty.  This will be referred to again when I write a blog about sanitation in Morocco.
4) Even though you are allowed to wear what you want, no one else wears shorts.  Or tshirts.  They really all wear sweat suits.  We have tried to determine if Moroccans simply do not have sweat glands.
5) There is a woman who sits in the locker room on women's day.  It is sort of awkward because we don't know if she is supposed to receive a tip or if she is there for any particular reason.  She mostly stares at us and whispers to the Moroccan women.  It just feels strange, but I guess for as long as we have European features, we will be stared at everywhere we go until we hop on a plane out of this country.