BRAWL

I SIGNED UP for the gym yesterday and ended up seeing the 5-on-5 Olympic Men’s Chinese Brawl won by the personal trainers. Here’s how it went down:

I walk into the sales room, and asked:

Me: CAN I SIGN UP FOR THE GYM？
Sales Guy: SIGN UP？
M: YES， YOU KNOW， JOIN？
S: JOIN？
M: YES.
S: UMM， MEMBERSHIP？
M: YOU GOT IT.

That’s right. He understood the word with more letters instead of the ones with less.

We sit down in the break area and talk about the price. There are a few guys off to our left, hanging out near the juice bar. All seems calm, normal. I’ll be out of here in a couple minutes with my four month membership. At least, that’s what I thought --- until two of them started pushing each other. The next thing you know they’re fist-fighting. And no sooner do they start brawling than five more guys rush into the room and attack his buddies.

The maylay is in full throttle and I give up my front row seats in favor of the ones on the other side of the room. At first I thought it was amusing – “Hey, these two guys are gonna fight.” But when the other five came in the room, it all seemed coordinated and I didn’t know what was going on. One of the guys made a run for the front desk when one of the personal trainers took him down Brian Dawkins’ style.

It was pretty crazy and the whole incident was over in about 15 minutes. Watching it wind down was bizarre. No one really came in to break up the fight. The guys just got tired of punching each other so they stopped fighting, grabbed each other’s collars, and walked into a room to give diplomacy a try.

At this point, the sales guy made his way over to me and said, “Sorry about that. Where were we?”