Episode 32: In Which DFM Goes "Camping" With His Students, And Learns His Lesson (Or Does He?) About Trying To Impress Girls

On Monday, Hyenii (the English teacher at one of my schools) told me that I wouldn't have class on Wednesday because the school was taking the children on a field trip. My boss however later told the school he wanted me to come along (I suppose he was worried about all the work I had been missing because of the school closures). While I would have liked to have had another day off, and having to wake up an hour earlier than usual to catch the bus from the school was not fun, at least I did not have to teach anything.

When I showed up at school I was told all sorts of different stories about where we were going. Some children said we were going to have a picnic, while others said we were going "camping." However, where we actually went was a smaller version of Edmonton, Alberta's Telus World Of Science (The Space and Science Centre, for all of you readers who don't have enough fingers or free brain cells to keep up with all the name changes the Centre has gone through).

Playing around with a bunch of fun science experiments all morning was quite fun. However, it would be a waste of everyone's time to read about it since you really had to experience them to be interested by them, so I won't write about them here. After the trip was over I was told to go home on my own by the subway. However, I decided to go climbing again for the third day in a row. This was a mistake.

I don't think climbing three days in a row was necessarily the mistake, but after an exceptionally hard day of climbing on Monday, and an ego-driven day of hard climbing on Tuesday (I tried to impress two of Korea's best young female climbers who were visiting the gym), I had absolutely no strength left in my muscles (힘없어). In the end it (trying to show off) was pointless, because both of the women were better climbers than me on my best days, and I was already weakened from the day before. Long story short, no one was impressed (at least one of them complemented me on my Korean).

There is a certain route in the gym that consists of 100 moves. Perry told me that the Korean name of the route translates to "Once Around The Village," which is perhaps the best name for a route I've ever heard. I've completed this route on three different occasions before this, but on this day I failed to complete even the first 20 moves (힘없어.)

Despite not actually climbing anything of significance, and probably doing more harm than good, I still managed to waste about three hours at the climbing gym this night. I was, however, able to worry that I may have negatively impacted my ability to compete to my full potential at next week's (this week since I'm posting this late) Ace Climbing Competition. I'll have to wait and see what happens after a good rest.