An ordinary Wednesday.

These days, my Wednesday starts from noon. I leave home at around 1 pm and head to OISE library. With a large Tim Hortons’ coffee, I sit there and read some books about teaching English, write a blog post, or watch some dramas with my laptop. I wish I could use a wireless connection in the library but I must be a UofT student to use it. I am asking around to see if someone let me know their account but so far I couldn’t find anyone. Anyway, I usually stay there until 6 and move to Bay&Bloor where the language exchange meeting takes place. There is an inside sitting area near Indigo bookstore. It’s a quite good place to have a meeting with around 10 people. I have been doing the meeting since last October. For the first a couple of weeks, I only got two or three people at the meeting but yesterday there were 12 people. It gets bigger and bigger.

I really enjoy being able to speak two totally different lauguages. I talk more than usual when I am with language exchange folks. I guess it’s because I am learning English like other international language students, so I understand them better and have a lot in common with them. That enables me to assist them to learn English with other English speakers and I aso learn from them while doing it. I am also a Korean speaker, so I can help Canadian learner of Korean. They ask me so many questions I haven’t even thought about them before. So, I look up my dictionary and try to give them right anwers every time it happens. I don’t know every Korean word and grammar. I also learn Korean at the meetup. With doing all these, I feel so happy that I have something to share.

The Wednesday language exchange meeting ends at 8 pm. While some go home and some go for dinner or coffee, I go to Travis’ place to get a ride with him for inline skating practice. So, I went to Bay subway station. While waiting a train, I found one drunk guy sitting on the bench and swearing. At that time, I was with two other Korean students. I asked them to move away from that guy. I walked away from him first and my two friends followed me. I heard about it later that one of my friends made a eye contact with him and talked to the other friend about something in Korean. The guy stood up with an angry face and followed us. I didn’t know why at first but I figure that out later. He said to my friend, “You laughed at me, huh, f****, blah blah blah”. He was very offensive and hostile towards my friends. I tried to keep them apart before something really happened. We walked away from the guy but he kept following us. I said to my friends, “Keep walking and don’t look back, just ignore him”. The guy eventually stopped following us and I heard the guy swearing to us but we just ignored him and kept walking to the other side of the platform. I knew that the guy wasn’t going to do anything stupid because we were three and he was drunk but I thought my friend would’ve done something bad. That was my first time involving the kind of situation here. I guess I coped with it well.

The thing didn’t get worse, so I managed to get to Travis’ place in time. It took us for around 40 minutes to get to Scooter’s in Mississuaga where we practice from his place. As soon as I got there, I got changed and put skates on and skated.

Last night, I didn’t sweat as much as I usually do for some reasons.The warmup was fast and tough enough to get me drop out earlier, so I didn’t skate long enough to sweat. It usually takes long for me to warm up. The drill afterwards was easy and short and the relay was not difficult since the first guy skated one more lap than we did which gave us extra time to rest.

I always put myself half step behind on the line during practice because I am not serious about races and I am safety-conscious due to absence of health coverage during stay in Canada. Skating is fun and exiting for me but as long as you are on the line, you put yourself in some degree of danger. Apart from that, I am happy to skate with my skating buddies and have fun. It makes me feel alive since my life here is more laid-back and relax unlike I had in Korea before. Every time I skate at Scooters, I feel like skating practice is like a miniature version of hectic life. We are at the line and start at the same time and compete and finish. There are also mistakes, falls and sometimes cheating. There are smiles and cries afterwards. There is the right track for winning and harder way to get around. It’s very similar to life we live in. So, the practice in the club is only I can get out of my daily relaxing routine and put myself in lively life.

It is almost 1 pm when I get back home from the practice. It's late to eat something but I do and I spend a couple of hours on the couch watching TV shows or news until I get sleepy to go to bed.

This is my ordinary Wednesday.