Got a cold in Shangai, but not that cold!

This would not be such a news just thinking that normally here in the south the temperature is between 15 and more than 20 while when we got to Shanghai and spent the night on some benches at Hong Qiao airport the temperature was quite below 10 degrees C.. and a constant draught coming from the elevator shaft not too far..

As companion for the sleepless moments I had the Norwegian version of “Red Dust”, nice book about the travel across China by Ma Jian, 马建, in the early 80s. Book and writer are banned in China for, of course, political reasons!

a night at Hongqiao airport

Unfortunately other news from the area between Shanghai and Anhui province (yes, where there is Hefei and Anqing, 潘雷’s hometown), passing through Hangzhou and Jiangsu province are on a completely different level of gravity: an outbreak of H7N9 flu, also known as avian influenza virus or bird flu virus, has already caused 6 deaths (as for Sunday).

The event is so serious that WHO has created a page for info about the human infection spreading.

Let’s just say that during the weekend we kept ourself far from chicken and similar products.

Today my sniffles and coughing and sore throat are healed already, so I can be sure it was never anything serious, but I had noticed already when I went to Hong Kong to practice Aikido that the usual health control at the border had more “doctors” than usual and they seemed a bit more active around the infrared cameras to check the temperature of the people in transit.. Let’s see this Sunday, when I will cross again the border for more practice!

Long time no see, Shanghai!

Tomorrow starts the 清明节, Qingming festival, or Tomb Sweeping Day festivity, 3 days off form work, at which I add a forth one and take a trip to Shanghai to meet friends I haven’t seen in ages! That mens of course that next week will be a bridge including a working Sunday.. yeah!

On the oither hand, I will manage to catch 2 Aikido sessions, one at Shanghai International Central dojo and the typical first of the month Saturday of special practice at Shanghai Xijiao West Aikido dojo. Resulting not only in good Aikido but also in meeting lots and lots of friends after ages! This will help my mind during the working Sunday!

I miss also the feeling of a big city: going to Hong Kong helps a lot (maybe even too much!! it is really crowded in the streets HK!) and the offer in restaurants and activities there is something I also major miss in Longgang. Even Hefei was better!

Anyway, soon get on my way, and some time after also bye bye Longgang and China..

I’ll miss some as well, not from Longgang though!

Have a good wekeend folks!

Hamburger, pizza or kebab?

(Spoiler: no Aikido, only food and blabbedring here, even if it is related with the weekend of the previous post )

Sunday practice in HK and even getting up at a good relaxing not working days hour I manage to get to HK and have time for a good lunch before practice. Given the international place, much better than the village, Longgang, where I live, I wanted to have some western meal. OK, kebab is also Asian geographically but I associate it always with Norway (Norwegian late nights with friends but also alone usually on the way home giving the proper break during long walks!).

So I went to North Point only because I stayed in this area during Endo sensei seminar and it seemed to have several restaurants (yeah, ok, anywhere in mainland China/HK/Taiwan there are several restaurants!). I dd not want to go to more fashion and extremely western places like Wan Chai also because North Point was closer to the practice place subway stop.

But after walking around and finding nothing on the main road I went on some parallel small one and inverted my walking, going then toward the subway.. Still nothing western (I did see a couple of steak restaurants, but the typical Chinese version that is always ok looking but terribly oily and never properly done!). And then found something more interesting than burger: time for sushi!!

sushi lunch in HK

It was ok sushi, even with the disgusting sea urchin and one with a large prawn or crayfish. Tasty. Maybe even too much!

Then it was time for shopping (cheese and chocolate especially), practice and then time to get back. At the border it went smooth and fast, so fast I decided to get my burger with a good beer at the Irish bar in the center.

Double cheese, where the double affected only the meat (yummy) but not the cheese resulting in a quite dry burger. Over killing it with ketchup and senep did help a bit. And the Kilkenny draft encouraged. Also, for once, I managed to watch some football while eating.. Ah, why a sports bar in Longgang seems so difficult?

burger dinner in Shenzhen

It seems like a lot of food, but one must not forget that besides the 2 hours practice, the trip is all together a good 6 hours (3 per direction) including walking, subway, train. Especially in the night I always get home dead tired. This time I got home with also a little pain inside my right knee. Long time no problems.. a pity now, because this wekeend I will be in Shanghai for some festivity and practice.. Let’s see if these days of rest will help.. even if I am going to carry a heavy bagpack with several books to leave to 潘雷 and Wednesday night I’ll sleep at the airport (or train station, I don’t remember which benches were more confortable)..

Shomenuchi?? Really??

I have been practicing at Shenzhen Aikido club since November when I moved here. They have a schedule with 3 sessions per week, but given the distance and practice time I have managed max 2 sessions, and I admit not every week, but I have been practicing there!

The club is quite beginner level: they got a couple of black belts, some dark color ones (brown, blue) but the majority of people is in the range white to orange, with the higher number in the white range. A start up club (even if it has been there long) facing the problems of a border business city, with Hong Kong just 1 hour form the center and where most of people deals with lots of traveling in their daily job. There is anyway a quite well established core, and the teacher is well motivated: Alan, 4.dan, who lives in Hong Kong and commutes to Shenzhen just for practice.

Besides being beginners they are also hard! Stiff, mainly, both beginners and not, both males and females. Then also most of their Aikido forms are what I call “old Aikido”, lots of use of arms and push/pull and strength, typical of beginner level (we have all passed through that! No complains, for the beginner, but then when you get farther on the path you should try to work on the “soft” forms, as Endo sensei says often now!)

Anyway, the people are nice. And dedicated. Luckily for me the physical stiffness is not a mental one. They mainly are Chinese with a few foreigners, long time living in Shenzhen. I am the only new fresh one among the foreigners, and the only new already Aikikai graded that I have seen joining the club (except for a couple of business men traveling with their keikogi, as we all do!). Some of them are also interested in the feelings I do manage to transmit from time to time during practice, and in different way to perform ukemi or be uke.

I am not teaching there, I do not expect to be able to do that and I do not want to confuse or mislead the beginners from the way of their teacher (even if it is not my way.. I do need to practice!). But I also told the teacher, at the very beginning, that some techniques I would have not performed in his way (if asked by training partners, I would show the teacher way, but usually anyway my variations are so small for a beginner that they do not even see it) and I would have tried always to keep my mind and my center relaxed and free. This is something most of my partners there feel.

So, for a club that is a beginner one, before last Tuesday I cannot remember to have practiced shomenuchi!! What I remember of the practice sessions is, always, techniques from katatedori gyaku hanmi, katatedori ai hanmi and tsuki. Also once per month at least there is a tanto dori session (all students are equipped with their own tanto, except me!). And once or twice in a while we have sessions without mats, “in order to learn how to fall on the floor in a soft way”, according to the teacher vision.. but I will talk elsewhere about this.. Anyway, tantodori and tsuki are definitively not among the techniques I consider important to build up the basics in Aikido!

Pipo says hi!

More crazy?

No, quite the opposite, this might be the first post of a new multimedia life: I’m writing on my Pipo M8 tablet straight in WordPress editor, therefore using goAgent GAE version.

There are still several issues related to this damn thing called tablet that I have slapped already more than once. But being able to jump over the great firewall also like this is definitively a good news.

Some features still seem to not work.. maybe more slapping is needed…

…and just before I could post this few lines the connection fell and I did not manage anymore to get on the proxy.. talked too early, again!

Did I lose it?

Two months into 2013 and I basically did not updated the blog (or the picture for what it matters). But I do not think I lost the interest in sharing my little insignificant life with the rest of the world. I still have many meaningless thoughts that want to get out of my constricted brain and find their way to the blog-o-sphere..

I have started updating the 2012 annual wrap up that will be posted during the weekend and some more thoughts..

Because if my finger have been idle on the keyboard, the rest of me hasn’t. Not only my underused little brain of mine, but the oversized body, during February especially, has been quite stressed, but in a good way!

I spent my Chinese New Year Holidays traveling to Europe: a fast as usual visit at home for an early celebration of both my father and mother’s 70 years birthdays followed by 10 days of great Aikido in Northern Europe (weekend in Helsinki, Finland, and 1 wonderful week in Stockholm, Sweden). No time to visit my beloved Norway, but soon probably it will be possible! In Finland & Sweden I had the pleasure to see several old friends, very close ones, and even make new friends. Among the old friends, Jacqueline (Stavanger Jūshinkan Aikido) graded very well to 1.dan and also Erlend (Oslo Sentrum Aikido) graded to 2.dan. I can say more about Jacq grading only because in the uke turn I ended up with her (even if I started first as uke of Patrick from Umeå and then enjoyed also being thrown around by Sara from Berlin!)

Very active days, starting from one session in my home town at Valdengo Aikikai dojo and then continued with an average of 2 sessions per day with either Endo sensei or Lyly sensei or Nevelius sensei or some other very nice instructor! And what can I say about the training partners? Just that both my body and my mind really missed (and misses) this kind of practice. I have to complain less because here in Shenzhen at least I have joined an active club with 3 sessions per week, but the Aikido style/level is nowhere close to what I really love.. but that is life and choices, and nobody is keeping me here with a gun pointed to my head.. At least also here the people is nice..

Once back, balancing with the job and the stuff to catch up with, I still managed to put one extra seminar, still with Endo sensei, this time closer to home: still about 3.5 hours (by metro + train) but the stage was in Hong Kong, and it was nice as well to meet new Aikido people just from over the border. And at the same time seeing again Ulrich and Francois “from” Shanghai (German and French, respectively ).

For now no more seminars and some compulsory overtime in order to catch up with all the extra days taken for Aikido. Some work, some quite interesting new management stuff to learn and an idea forming in my mind about the following months.. with one big Aikido seminar already planned for the 1.May holidays.

FUNNY THING OF THE DAY – I do not really know if it is the weather, my mind, bad luck or (I put here my money) the general level of stiffness in Shenzhen dojo, but when practicing up to 3 times per day in 12 days in Europe I had no joint troubles and during my first session back here in China, last Thursday, I felt some annoying pain in one knee and all the body was struggling to relax properly. And then I had to buy extra supplies of Feng You Jing and the tiger patches since I had given away all I had during my trip to Europe!

FUNNY THING OF THE DAY, 2 - Last week, the Italian political election took place and the results have been quite a shock for most of Italians. A sad and worrying shock. It leaves a quite negative environment and future prospect for Italy, whose economy is not that good already and now the country is facing a strong political uncertainty as well. Actually one party has won (not the “left”, not the “right” but the “we hate politics we are not politicians but still please elect us”) but the prospect of their intents is scary (the real ones, not the program that is actually a very.. left wing one!). Curios to see what will happen.. but stay abroad as well

Kind of late..

..but I want to wish all of you out there happy new year and assure you I am ok, still alive, still blogging!!

Sara & Mathias wedding

My dear friend Mathias left a nice comment at year change: I want to thank him especially and all the other friends and readers across the globe that have clicked on my blog and spend their precious time reading my stories and words of the past year. Many things happened, I probably did not manage to keep all informed as good as I wanted: I have been slacking off big time, many posts are just started and save as draft, many posts are still jut on my mind..

But I want to promise you that I am not finished with my little aikidude project! As I was not over with Aikido when I moved to a place with no club, but I found my ways to keep practicing.. Now internet has been the harder challenge: very unstable here in the south, and being forced to use the tunnel (proxy) for opening wordpress I suffer even more. Lousy excuse, I know!

I had received new year visit by 潘雷 and together we went to Hong Kong for new year.. soon posting pictures and a few words..

Then the life here goes quite slowly, not yet getting acquainted with the place and not completely with the work.. still looking for my dimension, but some step has been taken forward! Important, as 潘雷 tells me often, is trying to look forward. Decision time was earlier, now it is time to learn about the new life, without thinking too much about Hefei life.. now 1000km farther away!

The main change I want to achieve here is to better use the free time: now I am indeed sleeping a lot, even if the amount of really free time is not much. Working Saturdays is something I am not used and I am struggling with. I got several friends working more and harder than me, but still..

Anyway, the changes have been many, and the weather is just one of them:

Snow in Hefei

sky from my office

Waiting for the summer, the wet and hot real southern weather that will make me certainly suffer, now it is not difficult to enjoy the blue sky, even if I kind of miss the snow.

Said that, sending my greetings to my friends and promises of better activity for this 2013, respect to the drop of the end of last year, I close and wish you all a wonderful 2013!