Farewell Dresden

What can be a better lunch break than sipping a cup of tea and writing the blog? Well, this is the only time I've got at the moment for other things than writing my thesis anyways.

Last night I farewelled with the Dresden kenshi. We did first 30 mins of little exercises, especially to practise the wrist action for the tenouchi. Stephan asked us to keep the shoulder, arms and the elbows relaxed while only using the wrist to hit the target. We started doing it a couple of rounds while standing still, hitting the opponent's men without the gloves. Then gradually we work towards the complete action - raising the shinai with shoulders and fumigomi.

For the next 30 mins, I had to fight in shiai with every person who wore bogu. It was in fact a lot of fun for me because there was no pressure for me to win, but instead to fight with everyone who I haven't fought in a few months in shiai. Though it was exhausting I have to admit. At the end I had to do ai-kakarigeiko on everyone, during which I got a few times cramps on my left calf muscle. You can see from the video that I jumped on the same spot a few times trying to loosen up the muscle... Unfortunately only the first 3 mins of the series of matches were taken on the video. But I won't forget the rest. Thanks to last night's training, I had the best night of sleep in the past month (only 5 hours everyday, can you imagine that!).







From now I will be all over the world until March, when I'll be in Dresden again.

The first stop: 19th Oct Friday - 22 Oct Monday

London

I love this one. Everyone looks so casual!