10 AM:
Saw America Hyunkyeong on my way to school this morning! We high-fived.
Holla! Had a good first class, though I'm kinda shocked that I survived the weekend.
Becuase I accidentally rode my bike to Daejeon.
Daejeon is a fair piece away. It's almost 25 minutes by train. And the way I got there was thusly:
My friends are in killer shape. I've been running 4 miles a day, 5 days a week, and I'm not close to being in their league. But they decided that a few of us should bike from our tiny town to a much larger town 2 hours away, so we could eat brunch at a cool place that just opened.
It was hard, but I survived the 2-hour bike ride. Brunch was good. Some of the girls were going to bike another hour to Daejeon and some were going to bike the 2 hours home. I had a dreadful dreadful bike-seat malfunction that had to be repaired at a shop, but by the time I got it fixed, I was somehow grouped with the Daejeon Girls not the Going Home Girls.
Okey dokey. I couldn't ride my bike home because I didn't know the way (also: tired), so my buddies tried to put me on a bus. Bus driver says no bikes. I had two choices: I could leave my bike chained up in the city and trust that I might eventually be able to work my way back to it (unlikely...it would take way more time than I ever have to spare).
Or I could park my tired self on my bike for another hour in the Saturday sun and get to Daejeon, whereupon I could ride the subway to the train station and take a train home.
So I did that. I struggled and struggled and fought to keep up with the girls, because they would eventually notice I wasn't with them, but I could be lost for several minutes before they discovered the fact. And we were riding on this special bike path between the 12-lanes-o'-traffic highway.
Meaning that lil' old me, she who had only purchased a bike on Thursday after not riding one since she was in 7th grade, was riding a bike at Many-Many-Kilometers Per Hour on a walled path in the heart of a Korean metropolitan city. And it occurred to me as I pedaled my wobbly legs off, that any time you mix me and travel, weird and unexpected things happen. I should really just plan for the wildly unexpected to happen. It finds me, regardless.
We all smooshed our bikes onto the subway and my friends got off early, trusting that I could get off on the right stop and get myself on a train just fine. And I could. Though I had to take my bike on about 5 different handicap access elevators to do it. A lot of the petite grandmothers with no English took care of me on the elevators, making sure I got on and adjusted before everyone else crawled in. Tall blonde tired girl with a tiny pink bicycle seems to be a big sympathy draw for Korean grandmothers.
(I didn't know, but my bike is very small. Like, it has gears and can get up very fast but it's not for serious mountain biking like what my buddies have. It's for noodling around town and looking cute. I was not aware of this until seeing everybody else's gigantic-huge-normous bikes on the ride.)
On the train, I was told I wasn't supposed to have a bike on the train (or maybe just on that part of the train?) but I know people do it all the time, so. They let me ride anyway. I got off at home sweet home, exhausted and slightly weirded out by my travel mishaps, and never so glad to see home turf. I mostly-walked my bike home, parked the little guy in the stairwell under my apartment, then went upstairs to rest.
Strangely, I was fine the next day. No cramps, no pains. I even went on a long Sunday evening run with no ill effects. Maybe my training paid off--I couldn't keep up with my adventure buddies, but my recovery time was almost nil.
In addition, I have kept my fish alive.
*applause* *throws confetti* *accepts rose bouquet*
I though he was a girl because his color is pale, between pink and red, and his fins are short, but further research about bubble clouds reveals my fishy to be a boy. I named him Butterfly. I nearly lost him when I tried to transfer him from his Ziploc bag into his new hanging bowl (he flopped out onto a washcloth I'd used to cover the sink drain, and he repeatedly resisted my attempts to pick him up), but we both survived. Now I feed him flakes and show him a mirror once a day, and he keeps me company. As he dances around his glass bowl, flippy-flippy. Swimmy-swimmy.
On Friday night, I was telling my friends that I no longer live alone--I share my apartment with an ambiguously gendered tropical fish. But now that I know more about betta fish, I can say with full certainty that I share my apartment with a boy-fish named Butterfly.
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12 PM: Whoop, whoop! My 2nd-grade class with NG went great, too. Like with my morning class, I moved all the kids upward closer to the front. It really helped with their concentration and was great for rapport, for mixing with the young'uns. I could chat with them more easily, since they were all neatly within reach.
The cipher paper worked GREAT. I put 2 hours of work into making a word puzzle for them and they responded beautifully, both classes. Hee. *Cera the Triceratops from The Land Before Time voice* "I found it! I fou-ound it. Hee."
They loved it. It wasn't too hard, but it was hard enough to be a challenge. 80% of them did it perfect,and the remaining ones had to have help to re-count the words in their cipher. Love, love, love. My boys were using their noggins. Then we turned the cipher into speaking practice, which was graaaaand.
Good. Second. Grade. Classes.
And some of the little guys followed me downstairs for chocolate and all was well with everyone. I've still got to figure out how to implement my plans for the Triple Class, but NG and I are going to talk it out tomorrow and hopefully I can figure something that will make things just a teensy smidgen better than before.
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