Hi guys, thought I would give a little update as I haven't posted for a while.
I've been sent to a rural area to work for the past 7 weeks, which is 2 hours flying from the city in the Western part of Australia. As a result, there is absolutely no table tennis here or anywhere near here. And trust me, I have been looking hard all around, the closest to table tennis I found was a table in the back yard of another doctor's house, sadly the bats there have got non-existent rubber, and the balls... perhaps I have been too pampered with my 3 stars D40+s at home...
Anyway, he has got a family so it was not appropriate for me to keep asking him to play with him. Apart from that, there are absolutely nowhere else. There is a recreation centre there, but they do not have table tennis. Given it is a rural area, with no table tennis, and nowhere for me to play piano (apart from a grand piano outside an arts centre which they were gonna hire me to play there but I declined as I didn't want to be practicing there when I should be performing), I decided to go gym.
The gym registration fee is quite expensive to me. For the same price, it would have given me 3 months worth in the city, but it would only be 1 month in that rural area. Because of the steep cost and nothing much else to do, I have been going at it very frequently, averaging 4-5 times per week. I did some regular checkups, and I am definitely seeing improvements in strength and muscles.
But back to the main point of my post..
It was, and still is, super hard living out here alone, with my hobbies taken away from me, and no friends around. I love table tennis, and not able to play or practice makes time pass really slow. What's got me so far is reading your posts here, hearing about what you guys did, how you went in the tournaments, and youtube table tennis videos. I am going to make a shoutout to the TTD episodes, they are the best series ever. If you haven't watched them, I highly recommend them. They always come out on Monday (British time), but for whatever reason, I have been waiting for it to come yesterday, it didn't come... And that day felt so long. Today it finally came out, and it is the best episode so far, featuring Dan!! Dan played so well, even though his opponents are so strong. I really thought initially that he would have lost the final match, but the 3rd set was superb. I'm going to share the video here, surely Dan wouldn't mind as it is his website xD
Anyway, if it's too long, summary is, living out in the rural area is hard without TT(D)
I've got a bit less than 4 weeks to go before I return to the city (civilization). I hope the TTD episodes will come out on time on Mondays hahaha.