Padel Playing Foreigner

For those that know me, know that when planning travel - a deciding factor of where I travel isn’t whether I can play Padel there or not, but I also cannot deny that if I can get a game in while there - I will.  So when the first Padel club in Hong Kong, Padel+ opened it's doors in September 2023 and offered free matches during a limited promotional 'soft launch' period - it was kind of a no brainer to visit my mate John in Hong Kong to test it out.  I decided to book a flight from Thursday - Sunday and chose to stay at the  Jen Hong Kong by Shangri-La   near Kennedy Town, which is where John was living at the time. Having not seen my friend in a few months, and this being only my second time to Honkers (and the first since COVID), I was of course looking forward to seeing if much had changed in the 5 years since visiting. John and Anna were nice enough to meet me at the express train station and escorted me to my hotel.  After dropping off my bags, and having a quick &quo

Back in July 2023 - I woke early on a Thursday morning to an email with the subject title " Marco, Your Role at   XXX Company ". After opening the email  the body went on to inform me that my role had been impacted and I was being laid off . Naturally this   sucked , but once the dust had settled and I had a few days to process the news - I did what any normal, sane and addicted Padel player would do. I booked a week in Bali to go play Padel.  A somewhat of an " Eat, Play, Love (Padel) " trip for me if you will. While in Bali, and not having to worry about emails piling up in my inbox, deadlines and the usual stresses of having a job - I really wanted to take the opportunity to refine my game. So alongside joining a few matches each day, I thought of no better way to do this than to book private lessons with a coach. So I did. That was the day I met  Jesús  - one of the resident coaches at  Jungle Padel  in Canggu, and the person that helped me significantly improve

As mentioned in a previous post, I'm in the fortunate position that my wife loves Padel ( almost ) as much as I do. She comes from a tennis background and has a real competitive spirit to do well in all aspects of her life. On 16 April, we entered our first Mixed Couple Tournament (held at Singpadel ) where we came second 🥈. My wife had previously played in other mixed tournaments when I couldn't so we were both really excited that we could play together and we were so happy to have made it to the final. The other couple deservedly won but we had so much fun on the day itself, and of course - socializing in the pub afterwards 🍻 The finalists from left to right (1) Me, (2) Jess, (3) Namrin and (4) Pablo. Guest appearance by our little Lola. There was a great turnout with 14 teams signing up. The teams were split evenly into 2 pools and each pool was allocated 2 courts. Teams could self manage their schedules as long as every team played one another at least once until each tea