People who work at American universities have access to some very valuable benefits. Among them: free access to great pools and gyms. Those benefits are very unusual at Chinese universities.

When we were in Jinzhou we were luckier than most of our friends. Our school had a bare bones gym that we could use for free. There were barbells and dumbbells, and a few Nautilus-type machines. There were no treadmills or stairmasters, but there was a dirt track across the street. Best of all, the gym was in a building connected to our hotel. Josh and I stayed in pretty good shape while we were up North.

When we taught in the South last summer, we didn’t have a gym, but we did have an outdoor pool. It was suspiciously low on chlorine, but we survived. The scenery was spectacular, too. The pool was framed by the tropical trees of Guangdong Province. Swimming a few laps in that environment was the perfect way to unwind at the end of the day.

Unfortunately, our school in Qingdao doesn’t have a gym, and it certainly has no pool. It has a dirt track and several ping-pong tables, but that is the extent of the work-out facilities here. People who want to run indoors have to hike down Hong Kong Road to Impulse Total Fitness, the most insanely expensive gym I have ever seen.

A yearly membership at Impulse costs 4260 RMB, the equivalent of $532.50. That’s about average for a gym in the United States.  But this is not the United States; this is China. A typical, gym-bound yuppie in this city earns a fraction of what their counterparts in the U.S. make. So why does it cost so much?

There can only be one answer: Impulse purposely sets its prices beyond the reach of that typical, gym-bound yuppie. They don’t want to cater to China’s emerging middle-class. The gym is a status symbol reserved for the privileged few.

And what does Impulse give its members in exchange for their $532.50? They get treadmills, weight machines and spinning classes, plus a two-lane pool that is always over-crowded. Yoga costs an additional 80 RMB (US$10) for every lesson.

Josh and I could afford to join Impulse if we wanted, but we decided against it. Maybe if it had a better pool I would learn to live with the elitist stink of the place, but not as it is.

So we were left with the problem of how to exercise without a gym. When my sedentary lifestyle really started to affect my mood, I knew it was time to do something. Just in time, I got a call from my friend Marlene Dietrich (not her real name), inviting me to go shopping with her at a warehouse, sporting-goods store called Decathlon.

Marlene is from Germany. I met her in my Chinese class. She moved here with her husband so that he could manage a Chinese-German joint venture company. Marlene has one baby, and another on the way, and she also has servants. She wanted to go shopping at Decathlon because she had access to her husband’s chauffeur on the day he was in Beijing. I immediately took her up on her offer.

At Decathlon I found what I needed: free weights. I picked out a 40-kilo set of mix-and-match dumbbells. They cost a tiny fraction of a gym membership, and they last forever. I bought a jumprope, too, just like Rocky.

Marlene and I took our purchases home. We went to her place first, then she told the chauffeur to take me back to the University. Since I had all of those heavy weights, I accepted his offer to carry my things up to our fourth floor apartment. It was awfully convenient.

Maybe I can get used to this class-based society, after all.