yo-GA, yo-GA, yo-GA

I have found a yoga class. What’s more, it’s right across the street from my apartment. It’s held in an elementary school, a gorgeous old building with a small square plaza in the center surrounded by white arches. The school is an awesome combination of old and new; a basketball hoop hangs in the corner of a corridor bordering the plaza and bright plastic desks are enveloped in white-tiled halls.

The instructor is a British woman, Emma, who moved here with her husband and now owns a guesthouse nearby. She led the class in a combination of English and Spanish, refreshing my vocabulary for parts of the body. A dove flapped by as we were in the warrior pose, the poetry of which was not lost on me (Spain never ceases to present poetry as reality, or vice versa).

And running around us as we held our poses was Emma’s four-year-old daughter Maggie, an adorable little creature with bright blonde hair and a British accent (it should not surprise me that a child of British parents would speak with a British accent, and yet it still seems so unbelievably precious). I thought back to yoga class that I fell in love with this summer, held in a heated studio, blocked off from the noises of Grand Ave by the instructors’ jazzed-up background music. This, completely different, seemed even more perfect.