20 cent gym part 2: bench press

Remember the 20 cent gym I blogged about? It was about the Chinese ‘muscle beach’:, a bunch of people assembling in a Shanghai park to work out every day. Frankly, the Chinese men pulling heavy weights while looking angry can be quite impressive (but why do they take their shirts off?), I decided to show the scene to a foreign visitor yesterday. After watching the spectacle together for a few minutes, one of them came up to me and dared me to do some bench presses.