You can lead your lovely horse to yoga, but you can't make it plank

'Namaste' was the only word I understood in my yoga class.

It made sense to me to purchase a gym membership in tandem with my scooter (newly dubbed 애마, "lovely horse") because I'll be walking so much less. So, after school I rode my lovely horse down to the local gym, and I fumbled my way through the signup process. I had a short session with the personal trainer, and he put me on some machine that's supposed to read my BMI and such. I was really afraid the machine had Korean parameters and was going to tell me I was fat. But, R2D2ard Simmons was kind enough to consider my American waistline within the normal range.

Later in yoga class, I just copied what everyone else was doing, which meant I had to peek from time to time when we were supposed to have our eyes closed. I said that namaste was the only word I understood, but that's not entirely true-- at one point I was downward dogging when I was supposed to be planking, and the instructor came by and meowed at me: "plaaaaaank-uh!"

The gym runs jointly with a sauna/jimjilbang, so after you work out upstairs, you can go to the jimjilbang, shuck your club-issued clothes off into the hamper, and nakedly use the steam room/hot or cold tubs/sitting or standing showers. The showers were full of the bendy ajummas I had just yogad with, though, so this time, I bowed out. Namaste ("I bow to you").