Changing Lanes

The first time I played table tennis was in 10th grade when me and a few others used to bunk class to go play at the schools indoor facility. I remember being useless at it initially but slowly I started playing better and even won a game a game against one of the better players in class. It was fun. I continued to play table tennis with an acquaintance when I was in 11th and 12th grade. I ended up being quite good at it compared to the people I knew. School ended but I continued to play once in a while for about a year or so during my college years. I was still decent at it and won most of the games I played.

Now for the past 4 years or so, I haven’t played table tennis at all. So when I heard about the Table Tennis tweetup, I decided to attend it to see how good or bad I was at it.

We had decided to go to Sports City that is located near the Union Metro station i.e. very close to where I live at around 3:30pm. I’ve been there before and know that they don’t have the best of facilities. It was surprising to see that the place still looked the same, even after 4 years. We played a bit of table tennis and pool. I was hoping to be more confident at playing pool because I felt I was less rusty but in the end I sucked at both. Apart from a single game with SJ where I managed to play well initially but that does not count because I was trying to teach her pool which reminds me that I’m a horrible pool teacher. Anyway I was rubbish at table tennis, more rusty at it than I ever imagined. It was 10th grade all over again. I know that table tennis is a difficult game but I never thought I’d be this bad. The only saving grace was that I wasn’t the only one who was rubbish at it. At least in the end we all had fun and that’s all that matters.

Coming to the second part of this blog post…Shoes.

I own two shoes. One is a pair of Adidas that I bought 14months back before I travelled to India and the other one are a pair of CAT casual shoes. Both of them are falling apart and I need new ones. So after coming back from the tweetup at around 6:30pm, I prayed Maghrib and decided to leave for Deira City Centre (DCC) to check out the Adidas store there to buy some shoes. I knew SJ wanted to go to DCC so I asked her to come along and she agreed. First we went to Sharaf DG to pick up some stuff for her and then went the Adidas store where they had nothing I liked so after that we went to this new store called Iconic that according to SJ had Adidas as well. They did have some but none of them were even close to what I wanted.

Left DCC and went to the Adidas factory outlet on the Airport road. Liked a pair but they were overpriced as they would have made decent playing shoes but weren't exactly what I wanted so decided not to buy them. SJ recommended we go to Al Ghurair city so we drove there, checked the Adidas store and Sun & sands sports but I didn’t like anything there either. Then went to Reef mall; tried Shoe mart, Athletes foot and this third shop whose name I can’t remember and none of them had what I was looking for. Gave up and headed back home.

It might seem that what I want is some unique totally different kind of shoes that no one seems to have but that’s not the case. I’m just looking for simple light weight running shoes with adequate grip (like the Adidas Supernova or Response trail) but all they seem to have are tennis, basketball or football shoes. Useless places…all of them.