My excuse for having neglected my blog for weeks and weeks is water-tight: for whatever reason, my computer at school has started blocking, along with the New Yorker website and the New York Times sudoku—though NOT the crossword, blogger.com. The hours and hours between classes at school, sitting in the silent gyomushil where I am allowed only to read or study, used to be prime blogging periods, but no more. And in the evenings, well, I’m too busy catching up on all of the time-wasting that my principal is so determined to prevent at school. Things like watching clips from American Idol and job searching (gah!).

Not that I haven’t been busy…In fact, in March I joined a gym, appropriately named “Mayday!”, and I have feel like I have turned into one of those weird exercise-y people who are always at the gym or on their way there. Not that I work terribly hard…I have a checklist of things to get through every time I go, and it just takes me forever. It probably doesn’t help that my version of “resting” between sets involves staring off into space for ten minutes while listening to podcasts. I really, really dig my gym, though, not least because everyone gets to wear matching outfits. On entering, you’re issued an exercise outfit for the day—gray and black for the men, gray and orange for the women, in a choice of sizes ranging from large to extra large. Let me tell you, there are few things more attractive than me bedecked in baggy, hideously tinted, polyester exercise shorts. There are mirrors all over the place inside, and I’m constantly spinning around to find that what I thought was my reflection caught at some weird angle is in fact a five foot Korean grandmother dressed identically to me. Find it odd that an old woman would go to the gym? Don’t worry, her exercise regimen, along with basically every woman who frequents Mayday, probably involves only the following two activities: walking and shaking. One of the primary forms of exercise at Korean gyms seems to be getting on the treadmill and walking. incredibly. slowly. while pumping the arms vigorously as though to pretend you are not walking on flat ground at a speed of 1 mile per hour but rather speeding up a mountain ridge. (I think ridiculously slow walking is endemic to Korean woman. I’ve started riding my bike to school, but during first semester I walked with my host sister to the bus stop every morning. When I walk by myself, our route takes maybe five minutes. At Yuli’s side, though, it can take more than 15. Sometimes I felt almost unable to walk so slowly and was tempted to just stop altogether and then walk quickly to catch up, but this usually turned out to be a bad solution because she would slow her pace even further—a seemingly impossible feat—to allow me to catch up.) After a vigorous walk, most people repair to the shaking machines, which is basically a big strap that you can loop around your body that will, with the flick of a switch, start shaking violently. Most people do each leg, their backs, and shoulders after every workout. I’m working my way up to the full body shake, though I’m somewhat impeded by my extreme ticklishness. The first time the trainer at my gym put the strap around my thigh and flipped the switch I literally screamed and tried to leap across the room, though the strap got in my way so I ended up straddling the small room with one ankle still hooked onto the machine with what I can only imagine was a look of total terror on my face. My trainer just frowned and told me, “Hm…maybe not today.”