One weekend in May, Martin led two seminars at the Dojo De La Roserai in Toulouse, France. Friday and Saturday were for adults, Sunday for children and teachers of children. And the whole week before that he and Vanda spent in Bordeaux… so here are his notes from the trip:
“Bang on you” – this was probably the most frequent phrase of our aikido weekend together. Traditionally, in early May, we went together with the aikido kids to the Svobodný statek na soutoku. The theme of the camp was the question, “What good is aikido to us in life?”
The exams are an important milestone in the life of an aikidist – and the black belt exams even more so. At this year’s seminar with Franck Noel, seven brave members of our club advanced to the next dan level. You will find their names in the article.
s the years go by, our Shihan Franck Noel gradually reduces the number of his seminars in Europe. And yet this year he found time to visit Prague.
Every seminar with Jan is a surprise. Jan refers to his teaching as “exploration”, and so each year we explore familiar techniques from new perspectives…
Hanami is a Japanese spring festival associated with sakura blossoms – traditionally associated with the search for peace and tranquility. It has been celebrated in Prague’s Dejvice for twenty-three years under the auspices of the The University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague. This year we participated in this festival for the first time with an aikido demonstration.
Almost 10 people were preparing for this year’s dan examinations, so we organized the preparatory seminar of the Czech Aikido Federation in Vinohrady with great pleasure.
It was still bitterly cold in Prague in February, and we were greeted at Barcelona airport by the sun and the smell of the nearby sea. And so we began to thaw…
On Saturday morning in Prague, around 100 children started their first training on the big tatami… and it was a line from one side of the hall to the other. Check out the photos! And we weren’t all there yet, because the bus with the Ukrainian kids got delayed at the border and arrived a bit late. After a warm-up together, we divided into age categories – small kids, bigger kids and teenagers – and started real training sessions full of varied movement, games and most importantly aikido.
Zdenko Reguli’s seminar in Prague in December was well attended after three long years. Besides us from Vinohrady, aikidists from more than 10 other clubs (even from abroad) came to practice.
We sat on the mats after practice, resigned expressions on our faces. I think Honza broke the silence: ‘When is the next training? And where?”
On that Thursday in November, the first snow fell in Stockholm. The beginning of winter. We slept on the tatami at the Iyasaka Aikidoklubb (there’s an insanely noisy air-conditioning system running at night) and got up at six in the morning. An hour practice, a quick change of clothes and a subway ride to Vanadis, where there was another morning practice at another club. Then we had breakfast at the cafe where Astrid Lingren used to go (Pipi Longstockking was written in the tenement across the park) and the lunchtime training was starting, which of course we also attended. Three workouts in half a day wouldn’t have been too much, but we kept up the pace of 3-5 hours of exercise on our sixth day in Stockholm… and we still had three more intense days to go.
November training of 3rd class coaches in Prague was attended by 17 aikidokas from 8 clubs of the Czech Aikido Federation – 8 of them were junior and senior teachers from our club.
This year’s Japanese Autumn Festival was spectacular! After a two-year hiatus, over three thousand admirers of Japanese culture gathered at Prague’s Markéta. The festival was organized by the Association of Japanese in the Czech Republic (Čeko Nihonjin Kai) and we again had the great honour of demonstrating Aikido at the festival. It was really a pleasure to practice there.
A cottage near the forest, training on the mountain meadow, cooking together, hiking up the hills on the horizon, morning exercises and night walks, conversations by the fire, swimming in the spa town, reading comics and watching horror movies… our camp in Jeseníky was really very varied!
This year was our 14th summer school in mountains. As usual it was full of exercises (7 days and 6 hours of training every day) and at the same time it was very different in many ways.