A great course about budo and the history of martial arts held at Dharma Gate Buddhist College in Budapest. The presenters were Szabó Balázs, Szemerei Márton and Abe Tetsushi Sensei.
This winter I am a lot into knitting and doing hand crafted things. Stay tuned for more posts about knit items I made for my friends. I always include the free patterns, too!
You are a martial artist and you have a story to tell? You have a beauty tip you want to share with everyone? Why not tell it here, on Beauty and Aikido? Any guest post is always welcome. If you want to feature on my blog just leave me a message and I will post your story.
I love and follow the Asian fashion, skin care and beauty trends. If you are also a big fan of Asian beauty and style, stay tuned for my reviews, tutorials and hauls!
This is a series of posts where I am presenting different aikido dojos from all over the world. If you want to feature too, do not hesitate to leave me a message.
I am looking at the moment for online shops that have cute Asian fashion and I found a lot of cute stuff on www.coco-fashion.com. I can already picture myself in this cute fluffy pullover fro the winter. AWWW so cute! Paired with some nice black leggings and boots it is a really comfy and cute wear. And it also has that lovely lace detail at the bottom. I was browsing for a lot of other stuff, they even have Rilakkuma sports suits with hoodies. A must have! I put a banner on the left hand side you can click on it to check out their clothes. Will let you know in a subsequent post if I end up ordering something from them.
^.^y I got tagged by Elle, you know when someone writes a post or does a video about something and you are supposed to do the same. I like the blog and videos of Elle a lot. She does pretty straight forward and really detailed reviews that I enjoy reading and watching. The tag is called What's on My Nightstand. Apparently at this chapter it is not my most girly side that comes to light. I just thought I would take a picture of my nightstand just as it looks right now, at 2 p.m.
My nightstand is in fact a metallic chair with a Sony dream machine on it that wakes me up every morning (except weekends) at 6:15. Right near it is a metallic spotlight at the light of which I am reading at the moment two great books from the Japanese library: The Paper Door and Other Stories by Shiga Naoya and Best Aikido. The Fundamentals by Kisshomaru and Moriteru Ueshiba. I will do some voice recordings soon from the letter. And voila the whole picture:
And a close-up with the spotlight:
If I had more stuff lying around near me I probably could not get sleep. I am a big fan of simplicity and because of that of Japanese interiors. I sometimes look at albums in the library with Japanese interior decoration and I love it a lot. I am aware that the average Japanese live in small spaces where everything is crammed together. I have seen pictures of that, too. But what I am talking about is the pictures of clean and simple interiors that are supposed to inspire you. These pictures are more or less works of arts in themselves. I love the poetry of the empty spaces as it appears in interior decoration, just as much as I admire it in haikus or ikebana. Here is a sample of simple and clean interior decoration:
Source: beinteriordecorator.com
So now it is time for me to tag the blog I love and would love to see what the nightstands of these bloggers look like.
I am finally officially 5 kyu. It is written and signed in a little blue notebook. I didn't really care about what grade I would be and what results I would reach when I started aikido. The whole fuss came because Sensei was pushing us to pass the exams. My attitude somewhat changed now and am really determined to take it more and more seriously. But enough about seriousness and let me spice this post up with a bit of whimsicality.
This week I was wearing an OPI nail polish and it remained almost the training.Unbelievable but true, the Who Needs a Prince nail-polish resisted all the hardships of whole day tiping in the office and training.
Usually no normal nail polish resists. It is only the gel nail polish that survived a whole week on my nails. So I would give an A+ to this nail polish. I never thought that it would be this good. I saw lots of girls raving about it on YouTube, but was not really convinced. I will for sure do a review and some looks with the nail polishes and some other little nail art decorations I got.
Back to training, this week we were doing a lot of techniques from ryotedori: tenchi-nage, kokyu-nage, shiho-nage. I still cannot remember all the names of the techniques so a sempai girl who already wears hakama sometimes helps me and sends them to me.
☆Thanks again.★
I will make sure and watch the techniques on YouTube again on the weekend. I consider that I can many times learn from them also. However nothing compares to the actual training.
Today we have training with weapons.I am a bit weak at techniques with weapons. At the beginning I did not really take it seriously. At my previous dojo it was not practiced. Many dojos don´t practice any catas or techniques with weapons.
So I sort of skipped Friday trainings almost all the time. The moment I really got to know the weaponed techniques was in the summer training camp.
However this Friday I will not be there either, as I am going to a great Japanese dinner at a restaurant. It will be great. Some traditional foods will be prepared and a short story will be presented for each and every one.
Will make some fotos and keep you posted on that also!
Update:
Some of the videos I watched to observe the techniques better:
There are a lot of new words you learn once you start aikido. One cold say this is one of the effects of aikido on you but for sure not the only one. As the names of the techniques are in Japanese it is rather hard to keep them in mind and for a beginner they are rather overwhelming. At the moment I am there where I at least know the name of the attacks (which are of course much easier and less numerous then the neutralizing techniques). I still find it hard to keep in mind the names of the techniques we practice. Today we did a lot of things from ushiro katatedori and katadori menuchi, (these are some names of grabs) but I could not tell what the names of the techniques were. This is really bothering to me and I tried to do something against is. I sometimes watch YouTube techniques on the web and try to memorize the names. Some other aikidoka from the dojo suggested I should write a training jurnal...but how? As soon as I get home, I forget the names. All in all, I am having a lot of fun at this training camp. It is the first one where I can really enjoy myself, because I can fall better and don't have severe pain in any part of my body. Earlier, when I fell really badly, it was hard to pull throught a three hour training. But now I can enjoy it and pay attention to the details. Maybe at a certain point I will remember the names of the techniques also. Tomorrow the seminar is continuing and there will be some exams also. I am not taking one this time because one needs a lot more knowledge to be 4kyu.
Update: In the end I was supposed to take an exam to correct errors from earlier. See my post about that here.
