Saturday morning I tried out the only certified Bikram studio in Beijing. It's inside the Pacific Century gym.
You go down some stairs into the stomach of the building and you find yourself in a small studio full of mirrors. The ceiling is covered with black tubes emitting white vapours: it's like entering the set of a movie where something evil is hiding behind the vapours. More than this, the ceiling is actually dwarf-size: when I stretch up, my fingers touch the tubes...
Then the teacher arrived. She is a former ballarina and Chinese world champion of Bikram. What I didn't know was that during the last year she had "invented" her own style of hot yoga, called Soma, which is a mix of Bikram poses in a different order than the original sequence plus some other poses more similar to contorsions than anything else I have ever seen done. On top of it, since it was my lucky day, it was a "silent" class, meaning that the pupils add to follow the star-teacher's moves but she wouldn't explain anything, so that it was quite difficult for me to understand how my back could bend backwards and my head touch my foot which in the meantime was supposedly bending upwards..................................................................
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