A week ago I joined a gym in Paris and not just any gym but for sure the best gym in this city. I had been thinking about it for a while but wasn't sure I could justify the expense. Why pay to exercise when I can walk for hours around beautiful Paris for free. Of course there are plenty more things to do at the gym than walk on the treadmill so I decided to sign up.

There is a public swimming pool with a small gym near my house in Boulogne Billancourt. I was going to join that because it's so close and they have a couple of large pools. I like to swim but hate having to share a lane with some slow swimmer and they're always

so

slow. In the end I decided against this gym because they only have a couple of treadmills and other cardio machines and having to wait to use them would annoy the hell out of me. Plus local schools use the swimming pool and a lot of parents take their children there too. There's no way I want to be swimming with lots of kiddies.

In the end I joined Club Med Gym. They have 22 clubs around Paris and I can use any of them. Only 5 or 6 have swimming pools and they are all very small but there are no kids or teenagers around. There's no way they could afford the membership at a whopping 999E per year. I can barely afford that.

I go to the club in the 16th and it's huge. There are about 50 cardio machines and plenty of weight machines. They have aerobics at all hours including aqua aerobics which I haven't tried yet but hope to. The 16th is a very bourgeois area of Paris so it's mainly professional people who go to that gym. That suits me because they are there to work out and not much else. Although, there does seem to be a bit of gossiping going on which seems strange to me.

So far I've gone swimming once, yesterday, following by a hammam (steam) and the other days I've used the gym. I haven't done aerobics yet as I don't like that it's open and everyone in the gym can and does watch those doing aerobics. The last thing I need is loads of people watching me struggling through a class. Maybe I'll do that when my fitness improves a bit.

What is most surprising about this gym is that everyone is so fit and so slim. I'm the only overweight person there. The girls are especially skinny. They must have been going every day for years. I feel a bit out of place but I'm getting over it.

I'm trying to go four or five times a week. It's a 30 minute walk there from my house so that's an extra hour or so (it takes me longer on the way home) of exercise for me which I hope will help me get fit sooner rather than later.