The US Chronicles #1 (A Blog)
Background: I moved to NJ to study at NJIT for 9 months. I am Turkish and have never visited the US before.
I went to this capoeira class at my local climbing gym. This gym opened up (?) like one month and twenty days before I came to the US so everybody there is super new. Its a gym that also hosts a capoeira class, and if you sign up for climbing you get the capoeira for free. So I went there today. It was super nice. It was as good as I expected it to be. A lot of fluid movements that are super fun to do. There was this sparring practice where one does a combo kick. Two high kicks in a row and you end up doing a full spin around yourself. And the other person is evading those kicks by going down with a lunging motion. It was super nice. There was very deep stretching at the end and there was a cartwheel practice at the beginning. So everything I expected and more.
( However the class was only one hour. I wish it were longer. )
So after the class I ended up feeling like I wanted more exercise. I decided to climb. Turns out it was a good idea to bring my climbing shoes anyways. My legs were already worked so I just did a V0-V2 difficulty boulder to warm up and then attempted a bunch of V2-V4s until the end of session. I could flash some of them. I got stuck on the last move of a slopey one. Also there was two that I couldn’t even get past the starting move. However, there was this one that I did first try and some people congratulated me for doing that.
So let me explain a US climbing gym environment for everybody back home.
People are super nice!
People who climb at Method Climbing in Newark are super nice!
I was attempting a boulder. It took me some time to finish it. There were big slopers you had to hang from, and I took my time shifting my weight properly. So when I finally topped it and climbed down, a lady congratulated me. Also, the walls here are higher than what I’m used to, so I actually have to climb down. It hurts to just jump.
So turns out this lady was waiting for me to finish climbing so she could climb a route right next to the one I was doing. We do that in Turkey too. We wait for people to finish climbing so we can climb. We don’t wait in the fall-zones. However, never was I congratulated by strangers so many times. It was actually spiritually satisfying to climb in Method. Of course, in Turkey, where I climb, we do congratulate strangers, but here people were starting conversations with me left and right, and everybody was super friendly. I guess I’m just impressed by how friendly people were.
After that, I actually approached someone who I saw climbing. He was trying a very hard, controlled movement on a very slopey route, and I asked him why he changed his method. We talked for a little while and I found out he had graduated from NJIT too! Thats the university I’m attending as an exchange student. He called his friend over who had also graduated from NJIT and also studied the same thing I’m studying. Also, before I went, he actually asked me if I had other any questions about NJIT. See, he wanted to help me out. I told him I didn’t have any questions about NJIT, but that I would like to know where I could go climbing outside. He told me where I could go and after finding out that I didn’t have a car, he actually gave me his number and told me we could go as a group in the future.
People are super nice!
P.S.
Short coming home story
I went out of the climbing gym and into the dark streets of Newark. I was passing by a club and there was this guard outside. I was feeling super confident due to my recent empowering encounters, and I was also super interested in this club, so I was starting inside as I was passing by. There were booth-like sections with sofas and a lot of hookahs. And there was a small stage and someone was either singing or playing music.
When I was passing by, the guard, who was leaning against a car, asked me, do you know who that is? I said no and I took some steps forward, but then I stopped and turned around. I asked him, no I don’t know who that is. Who is that? He told me some stuff I couldn’t really understand. I told him I didn’t know. He said i probably wouldn’t know the singer, because he was from some place from some time ago.
I told him it was natural for me to not know him because I just came to the US only a couple of days ago. He asked me where I was from, and when I told him that I’m from Turkey, he asked me if I were a Muslim. When I said yes, He said Selamın Aleyküm, the way English speakers say it, and balled his hand into a fist expecting a fist bump. I said Aleyküm Selam the way Turkish speakers say it, and fist bumped his fist.
He told me to bring the bitches and come hang out at this hookah lounge club.
So thats it.
Giray's Sandal 