Day 82

01/07

First day of July. Had three hours of teaching today. It’s always nice to teach new students. I had some new faces in my two classes for Longwin. Then, I had an English Corner class for some middle school students. In the last two weeks, I’ve only had the two kids in that class. And the class is usually 5pm – 6pm, which on a Sunday afternoon, I have the least energy. This time, since it’s Summer Holidays, a few more kids had come and I found myself having more energy to teach – despite the new kids not wanting to speak. Summer holidays should be a time to relax and let loose, but for Chinese students, there’s not much rest time because they have to prepare for next year’s classes. English classes ramp up. Students will take any extra classes to get ahead of their classmates.

Today, I forgot my keys before I left home – you can’t open the door from the outside without a key. Luckily, I gave some spare keys to my uncle and aunty so that I could collect them in case something like this happened. So, I collected some keys from my aunty’s restaurant, had dinner and decided that I wanted to exercise and shoot some hoops. I usually like to shoot hoops on my own because it’s a bit of ‘me’ time and I want to improve my skills. I should probably start playing with strangers and being more social.

After a sweat session, some mates called me out to Arcano. Rory, a fellow Aussie was also there, and it would be the last time I get to hang out with him before he leaves for Saudi Arabia permanently. We chatted about Melbourne, played some darts and watched Russia upset Spain in penalties. If it couldn’t get any worse, my mate Chris told me that Arcano was about to close in two weeks.

Apparently, management want to rebrand the bar into something more classy (which in business means upping the prices of beers). It wouldn’t make sense for my mate to continue running this bar because most of his business comes from the expat community who are about affordable drinks.

Arcano was like my one constant every week. Quiz night. Footy. Mates. It was something I looked forward to. Now quiz night has officially ended for the summer. It’s about to be shut down. One of my very few mates here is leaving. It’s not the best situation. But then I thought, this is a great chance to get out of my comfort zone and meet new people and hang out at new places. There are a lot of bars that I haven’t been to. In fact, I felt like I could do everything within a 10 minute walk from my place – I got comfortable real early. Hopefully, I can have some new experiences in the future and get off my lazy ass to go to new places.