Niente Namaste

I still can’t get over the yoga class I tried out this evening with Stephanie and Sarah. I feel strange, Ferrara feels even more unreal than it did before after that class. Two hours after the class I still feel sort of funny.

Finding the class wasn’t easy. Advertisements for the yoga class were basically nothing more than the name of the gym, yoga, and the gym’s phone number. This week I worked up the courage to go and try the class out. See what Italian yoga is all about.

We walked for a good 20-25 minutes just to get to the place, in the south-east end of town, only to arrive at a normal looking façade, nothing yoga studio or gym-like about it. We enter and meet the teacher who explains her practice and guides us into the studio. The dimly-lit dusty-smelling room is laid down with mats that look like they could be used for camping.

The hour of yoga consists of guided breathing and meditation and yoga poses I have never before practiced in my life. I gave it a shot, tried to work into the flow, but it’s difficult to let go when you are constantly trying to figure out which side is destra (Italian for right) and place the names of the body parts so that you can fluidly execute the positions. At the end, with the final meditative position, I expected the teacher to give some words to send us off, or at least give us all a namaste, but it just ended. Strangely unfinished, and now still floating on some odd yoga planet, we’ve all decided to track down another yoga class and give it a shot again. Yoga just isn’t the same in Italy at all, I think I’ll stick to my personal practice with my OM yoga book and my yoga mat, that way I can go in peace.