Time Flies

May 24-26
London

Time has accelerated. I can't believe I've been in London a week already. Here's a quick recap:
Tuesday the 24th
Orientation in the morning followed by bus tour in the afternoon. Wow, the tube is crowded at rush hour. I still like it more than driving. I don't remember much about Tuesday, actually.

Wednesday the 25th
More orientation in the morning, and a NCBI (National Coalition Building Institute) workshop in the afternoon. The NCBI workshop had a lot to do with celebrating identities and diversity. At the end was a section about 'effective intervention' that has very direct self-defense applications, particularly in regard to intervening when you see or hear something (using one's verbal self defense skills to fight for justice and help those who need it, if you will).

After the class sessions, I headed off to London Seido. I had talked to the very helpful AIFS (American Institute for Foreign Study, the folks on the ground here who are coordinating everything) and they helped me find the place no problem. Two friends from the program were kind enough to take the tube with me, and we had dinner at a pub in Chiswick. Of course, we were short on time, and so I bailed early (and despite that was a little over-full to train, as we've all experienced).

What follows is karate geekery, those who don't care might want to skip it.

London Seido (at least the Chiswick dojo, there's another I haven't been to) was as friendly and welcoming as you'd expect a Seido school to be. We started with 30 punches, 30 punch combinations (jab reverse), and 30 more punch combinations (jab, reverse, hook). Then plank position and push-ups. That was the warm-up -- no stretching, just cardio and core. This was a kata class, and we did kata the rest of the class -- Pinan and Seido kata, mostly. There were the usual slight stylistic differences. The one I remember most is an over the shoulder grab in fifth pinan that is part of the juji uke. I'm looking forward to exploring that more.

After class I went home, getting in sometime after 9PM. End of karate geekery part 1.

Thursday, May 26
The morning was a tour of St. Paul's Cathedral, which is as awesome as it sounds. I went up almost to the top, but stopped short of going to the tippy-top. Rest assured I was plenty high up.

Next up was supposed to be a quick tube ride to Christ Church, with a stopover at Toynbee Hall before lunch. Except it turned out for me to be a tube ride in the wrong direction for a stop, and thus getting separated from the group, and also a little bit lost (as is my wont), so I missed the Toynbee Hall section (which was apparently very short), with only time for a super-quick lunch before getting to the Church. From there we walked to 19 Princelet Street, which is a museum that celebrates/focuses on diversity and immigration. It started out as a Huguenot residence in the 1700s.

More karate geekery follows.

Thursday evening I went to black belt class. There were two nidans and a few shodans, and the class was taught by Sensei Mark. We started with punch-kick combinations. No surprises there. We did, at some point, Seido 5 and Gae Sai Sho, as well, but the real fun were the Yakosokus, particularly Yakosoku 5. Two things: they often don't practice the turns, but they do practice it with a takedown at the end. Needless to say, that takedown surprised me the first time.


More to come...