The Telegraphic

In case you’re wondering about the title (yeah, even if you weren’t, you are now), it’s a quote from George W Bush off a bushlexia page, which is quite humorous. I even fired up my del.icio.us bookmarks so I could add them. There you have it.

I thought I should do a more upbeat blog because people have been thinking that I’m a bit depressed. I’m not, I was just complaining and being cynical. There are entire communities of people on the internet who do nothing but complain, like most forums for example.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing Aikido, which is a form of martial art derived from Ju-Jitsu (in 1942 by Morihei Ueshiba). There are some large differences between the two, however, as I had heard beforehand but never quite realised. Basically, Aikido is like a Tai-Chi version of Ju-Jitsu, where you’re more interested in inner spirit and perfecting a technique. Functionality never really comes into the picture – although having said that, if you managed to do a technique perfectly then you could do a lot of damage. All the techniques are very similar to Ju-Jitsu, but slightly different. The main differences that I can see is that you sometimes rely on the other person’s cooperation and that the stance is different. Even though the small differences have large repurcussions, I’m enjoying it and getting quite a lot out of it. I think I am making “Steadfast progress”. Last night, my rolls were 100% better than the night before (although they’re still very different to Ju-Jitsu – believe it or not). There’s a few things I hope to get out of it:

1. Improve my flexibility – we do about 1/2 hour of stretches before we start
2. Improve my falling (Ukemi) – when they fall over they do it with grace and elegance
3. Improve my body movement and locks (the main things they seem to seek prefection in)
4. Meet the grandson of Morihei Ueshiba – (Morihei also taught Jan De Jong, who’s school I belong to in Australia).
5. Get a bit fitter – we do 6 hours all up a week.

Tonight I’m heading over to the apartments (where the other exchange students live), where there’ll be a curry cookoff. Should be fun. Then I’m going canoeing on saturday and to a flea market out the front of a famous castle and shrine on sunday. But now I’m off to get ready for Uni.

Catcha later
Danny

This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 5:57 pm and is filed under Japan-Four. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.