Chapter 157

Again, I slept in, and lazily finished the morning cuddling with the girlfriend on the couch watching episodes of Love Death & Robots and videos about overland travel from the channel The Road Chose Me, eating watermelon and cherries. At around 12:30 I rode to a university campus a bit out of the city, where there was a soccer game. It was a mixed crew of kids from the college team, Korean expats, as well as my homies from Ghana, Mexico and the USA. Since I had a blue t-shirt on, I played for the Korean team, and they kept making calls in their strange language. Some of it I could understand, being an American puppet state (like Japan) they adopted a lot of English words, like “midupirdu” for “midfield”. It was stupid hot, I was covered in grimy sweat and my feet were steaming like xiaolongbaos in my cleats, but it was a good way to spend the early afternoon.

I rode back home, was damn glad the girlfriend had turned the AC on, and took a cold shower. I drank a Leffe, now that’s a beer I used to consume in large amounts but haven’t in a while.

Not long after, I went out again, one of the grade 12 classes invited me to their graduation dinner. I wanted to bring the dog so he’d get his day’s worth of exercise but the skin on his front paws is peeling and he didn’t want to go outside. He seems OK to walk and even run around on his own but gets aggressive if we’re about to touch the torn skin.

Dinner was in one of those run-of-the-mill banquet halls accommodating hundreds of people at once and serving set menus of mediocre food, but it was quite pleasant. One of the students gave a little speech (in English?!) and then the meal started, cake was inexplicably served right in the middle of it. I sat at the teachers’ table and had a few nice conversations. My Srilankan coworker is an audiophile and generally a big fan of electronic gadgets, he told me that once you invest in a good pair of headphones you can’t use subpar ones anymore. I was always a bit scared of paying a significant sum of cash for headphones, but with how much music I listen to perhaps I should take the plunge.

The students toasted us, I’ve been teaching them ever since they got in the school three years ago (incidentally the same time I started teaching here). Seeing them grow from children to adults is one of the nicest parts of the job, and as cheesy as it sounds, I’m glad I was alongside them during that time. They’re good kids, I wish them well.