Italian Yoga Class

For the last couple of months I’ve been taking Italian classes. It’s a change of pace to be in the student’s seat. Even though it is a beginner class, they have all taken Italian courses at school and have grown up watching Italian television. Needless to say, I’m not the star pupil. It’s humbling to be beaten on your conjugations by a 9 year old.

So one day, we began learning vocabulary for activities. “Doing yoga” was one of the vocab words. The teacher translated it (into Albanian) as Chinese exercises. I laughed to myself, but let it go. A few minutes later, we had to say sentences like, “I always read books.” One of my sentences was, “I sometimes do yoga.” This caused a great stir in the class. They started peppering me with questions. “What is yoga?” “How do you do it?” “Where did you learn?”

The teacher closed her eyes and started humming. “Is it like that?” she said. Nope that’s meditation. One student started karate chopping the air and I had to say that that wasn’t it either. So after several attempts at explaining, they finally convinced me to show them.

So in my jeans, three shirts, sweater and a coat. (It was really cold that day.) I did a sun salutation for my fellow students.

Just a moment of sharing “American” culture.