Lonely Girl Travels

For the final assignment of my five-month editorial internship with the trip-planning site NileGuide, I got to indulge my increasingly nerdy obsession with donation-based yoga.

NileGuidance, NileGuide’s blog, features weekly travel themes; I scratched my head and made several trips to the water faucet while considering what to write for fitness week. Then I remembered the inferno of an afternoon in the East Village, when Alicia and I jammed ourselves in a mat-to-mat studio and power lunged our hearts out (and thighs off). We took a pilgrimage to the mother studio of our beloved Yoga to the People, who had earlier that year reached its well-limbered tentacles to the West Coast. Our little Berkeley studio had been getting increasingly crowded (class sizes now edge over 50), and we wanted to get a taste of what the New York studio was all about. So, while spending a week in the most killer city in the US, we popped into a noon class. As the windows fogged up and our sweaty hands slid us out of our down dogs, we felt right at home.

Yoga to the People’s new San Francisco studio opened in May. It’s on the fifth floor of an industrial building that, in a previous incarnation, served as the venue for raucous illegal punk shows (carrying amps up five flights of stairs: not fun). Now, the space gleams with new hardwood floors and nearly floor-to-ceiling windows that display the San Francisco skyline with the effortless panache of a French girl.

Donation-based yoga is catching on like a California wildfire. Studios are sprouting up all over the country, all with the common goal of making yoga accessible to everyone. Not bad. And you can be sure I’ve downloaded Yoga to the People’s free podcasts, and will be busting some half-pigeon on my upcoming trip.

Check out the full post, or just google “donation-based yoga”—my post is coming up second! (SEO is a beautiful thing.)