Exercise or Exorcise?

AKA: "I gotta devil in the back wheel, back wheel, back wheel..."

In my adult class a couple of weeks ago, I had to explain the phrase “one hell of a _______.” God must’ve been planning ahead in his providence, ‘cause the only way to describe this week is by starting off with “well, everyone, it’s been one hell of a week.”

My bike is one that Pete, my predecessor, got me from one of his friends. I don’t know how old it is or how its previous owner used it, but I’m pretty sure that whatever they did made the back wheel an especially appealing living space for demons. It's the only explanation. For example, the back tire went flat one day; I can accept that this was likely because I was being an idiot and rode over a rock or somesuch. I went to get it fixed on a Friday and it was completely flat fewer than 24 hours later and for no apparent reason. Even better – when I found that it was completely flat was not when I was at home, but when I was at a train station and needed to ride this bike some 20 minutes in order to *get* home. (That was fun...) But I was unsuspecting of the demonic nature of this wheel, so I swallowed the $35 cost of fixing the same wheel twice in one weekend and figured I had to be more careful.

Zip forward to this past Monday morning. I was late leaving the house, and was hurrying on my bike to school. This of course meant that the lights were against me the whole way. Good news: there’s only one light to be against me between my apartment and the school. Bad news: the demon in my back wheel decided that my short stop at the light was clearly a time to wreak havoc. The light changed, I moved forward...and my bike decidedly did not. I thought the chain had fallen off (which has happened before on this bike), or something had gotten stuck in the back gear (again, has happened before). Investigation proved my theories wrong and offered no other solution, so I ended up carrying my bike the rest of the way to school – a good 5 minutes of walking. This, of course, made me late. Normally I wouldn’t care, but being late is a big deal around here, especially for foreigners; we're stereotyped as being so uncaring of the time of others that we're habitually late. At least my Kyoto-sensei (vice-principal; the one who cares if I’m late) got a kick out of my sob story about the bike and the fact that I was sprinting in to school once I got my bike locked inside the school gates, so I wasn’t in trouble.

What was the problem? The spokes on the wheel were broken. Thus, the wheel had collapsed on itself and bent the frame of the wheel, making the tire scrape against the bike frame in such a way that the wheel could not move forward or backward without great force.
Fun!

The groundskeeper drove me and my bike to the local bike store to see how much it would cost to get this problem fixed. Answer? A whopping $75.
Know how much a new bike costs? One that was pretty much the exact same as the one I have?
$95.

If I learned anything from all of this, it's that my kouchou-sensei (principal) and my supervisor are really great. Both of them offered me used bikes that were at the school/Board of Education to use instead of fixing my current bike. But, having strong evidence that used bikes equate to homes for damned spirits, I decided to spend the extra money to get a new bike. It's pretty, shiny, and I actually like its add-ons better than the ones my old bike had, so ... hurray! Although it was a pretty crappy scenario (one of many from this past week, I hate to say), it all turned out well enough in the end that I can smile, laugh, and feel pretty good about it in the end.

In conclusion:

Fixing two flat tires: $35.
Buying a new bike entirely: $95.
Getting a few laughs out of the grounds keeper by saying “this tire is a DEMON!” in Japanese: Priceless.