working out, for fake

Yesterday, I shopped gyms, which are large and lavish and inexpensive, and totally unlike the windowless cave under the Holiday Inn in New York, in which I'd mindlessly treadmill every couple of days. I cashed in the first day of a few trial memberships yesterday, because I was told that there was a pool. A pool! . . . twenty-five cerulean meters in length, at the top of Cloud Nine Towers, which is situated above the Central Hill subway stop, which is just five blocks from here. . . ! I hadn't been swimming for a very, very long time (nearly three years!, after an uninterrupted decade plus), and I was very, very excited. I'd swiped Charlotte's Columbia training suit before I left California, and also a pair of goggles, but no swim cap, alas, so I popped into the athletic shop, and was dismayed to find, that, as in Taipei, they carried no latex and only Lycra and silicon.
The second 'hm' moment came when I discovered that gyms in Shanghai don't stock towels. No bother; I skipped through the locker room and onto the pool deck, which held a subsequent number of small disappointments: three lanes, marked by yellowed, flaccid lane ropes; mostly ancient, pruned patrons floating about. Still no bother, I decided. I hopped in, and was promptly reprimanded by the lifeguard (no diving or jumping, please, miss).
The water was too warm for proper swimming, so I carried on at a leisurely pace for a wonderfully peaceful forty minutes, with only the occasional, gentle collision with some aged floater. Swimming's quite good for clearing the mind, a quiet activity executed in solo. I suppose I never gave it proper credit. My mind was lodged pretty firmly in some honeyed paracosm involving India and rollmops, when I was flagged down by a couple of young men, one of which wanted to settle some bet about swimming times, but who really just wanted a date (I think). Actually, what he said was, 'allow me to be your first friend in China, over dinner', and then recited his telephone number to me a couple of times. Telephone numbers, let it be known, are eleven digits long here, so he might as well have been asking me to please disregard this meeting, and to never call. I've also got to be a bit more wary about friend-making, I think, because, in Mandarin, there is no colloquial term for "dating" or "date" or "boyfriend" - rather, folks "meet" and "become friends".
He - I didn't really catch his name - and his friend left, and I decided to run for a bit. The treadmills face out against a panoramic wall of windows; the view is extraordinary, particularly, I surmised, at rush hour, when scores of neon lights and television screens - positively Triassic in size - begin to flash atop the neighboring skyscrapers, and a hundred million cars are gridlocked down below, and the sky is the color of a bruise. . .
I noticed, after about twenty seconds, that the gym wasn't air-conditioned. Which was normal, I gathered, given that the Chinese also don't believe in ice water, and are bundled to the brim, despite it being no cooler than a rather muggy 17 out. Still, this made running for an extended time difficult, and I retired fairly soon, bathed in sweat and chlorine, and unable to shower, for I hadn't brought a towel along.