After Peder and I had our fill of climbing atop and photographing ourselves on oddly-painted soviet tanks and nukes, we hopped on the metro bound for Hydropark, a popular recreational area along the bank of the Dnipro river.
Like Ada Ciganlija in Belgrade, Hydropark offers wide variety of outdoor activities – bungee jumping, jet skiing, sandy beaches, waterslides, and countless riverfront bars and cafes and clubs.
However, we were heading there for something different.
A workout. A very, very strange workout.
After more than two months of nonstop travel and only a couple real weightroom visits, I could literally feel my body deteriorating from within. Vain as it may sound, having just spent more than a year training on a nearly daily basis, the knowledge that pounds of strength had already disappeared was not something that made me particularly happy. I at least hoped to slow the decay until returning home, at which point I could work myself back to normal (before booking another trip and losing it all over again)…
Plus, HydroPark sounded like the most interesting gym I’d ever heard of…by far:
“Kiev’s quirkiest sight might just be Hydropark’s giant, makeshift outdoor gym. The machines here are cobbled together from used truck parts and salvaged scrap metal. It’s a testosterone-fueled affair, although you’ll usually see one or two women amid the muscle. Beware: the sight of hundreds of sweaty dudes in Speedos pumping primitive iron could be a little off-putting.”
Lifting in Hydropark felt a little like lifting in a jailhouse courtyard. Or maybe like a scene from Terminator 2. Whatever it was, it was very, very weird. But it did feel fantastic to at long last get my body moving, just a hint of real exercise after two solid months of atrophy 🙂
Upon wrapping up our workout, we stopped for a quick taste of the local fare – Vareniki – before heading home. Finally, the time had come for a Friday night out in our new favorite Ukrainian city.
My blood was boiling with excitement 🙂
That looks like a great place for a fight scene in an action movie
Whoa, I didn’t even think of that…but yeah, it totally does!
That gym was sooooo cool. And free! As in “free beer”. It was hard to detach ourselves from it actually. We kept leaving and not leaving after all to try “just one more weird machine-contraption”. I think we spent a good 2.5 hours there!
Haha yeah! I remember that towards the end, you were actually commenting on how short on time we were…but I kept on running away to different “machines.” You know that when I’m not thinking about being late, I must be having a good time
very nice
I can think of tons of funny comments here. “The machines don’t seem to be properly marked” “Which way to the treadmill?” “Tetanus and Testosterone”
LOL! And ironically enough, this is one of the most-viewed posts on my entire site (is “testosterone” really that commonly-Googled of a term? :P)
Oh, I am sure there are millions of search phrases/month that include the word “testosterone”. Now for the phrase “testosterone playground” you are ranked #1 because you have 100% relevancy which is great, but the term is obscure – you made it up..Do people actually enter that? If so that is really cool.
Google Analytics doesn’t show any incoming “testosterone playground” searches. Hmm, I wonder why this IS such a commonly-viewed post – maybe it’s just a fluke in webcrawler traffic as I only recently fixed my backend hitcounter to ignore crawler pageviews (and Google doesn’t show nearly as many hits anyway) 😛