Poles on Puget Sound

I recently purchased a Groupon to take a handful of pole dancing classes at a gym in DC.  Pole dancing is a lot harder than it looks and requires a considerable amount of balance, upper-body strength, and coordination.  And, like any other form of exercise, it requires practice in order to improve one's abilities.  What sucks about pole dancing is that....you really need a pole to practice.  If you're stubborn like me and have to comply with certain agreements in your lease, then you're not going to set one up in your home.  Which means one must take to the streets in order to find adequate poles for practice.

This is also harder than you would think.  Good poles are apparently hard to come by.  They're always too wide, too narrow, or too unwieldy.

On our recent trip to Seattle, after wandering through Pike Place Market a bit, I took Anna and Joh down to the waterfront.  It was there were we discovered, near the weird statue of Christopher Columbus and by the Seattle Aquarium, was a raised stage... with some poles.



Now, as you can see...these are not quite ideal poles.  They were not nearly sturdy enough to do a catch-spin or to try and lift yourself off the ground.  Also, at least one side is situated on a step, so that makes things a bit awkward.  But I thought that they were decent enough to play around on and try a few tricks.  I tried to demonstrate some of these to Anna.
This mainly consisted of a lot of spinning around, since I had forgotten how to do most of the tricks I had learned in the one class I took a few weeks ago.







And trying not to fall off of the step to a concrete death.



Joh opted not to participate in the pole festivities, opting instead to play photographer.  Because she is not a shameless woman.

It just goes to show you that if you know where to look, opportunities are everywhere for random, shameless, fun antics with friends.