Yesterday was a fairly nice day except for the weather, who decided to misbehave slightly. I spent the morning not doing too much, some doodling with my tablet while watching some of Dexter and Life before heading out to uni for Kendo training.
Since it was exam season, the hall was now being set up for exams, which means we don't have regular training in it until after they finish. One of the other seniors had arranged for us to do Kata instead on the oval. The turnout was actually really good and we had about sixteen people turning up, and a mix of beginners, advanced beginners and seniors. Since most of the people didn't know any Kata at all, we went through Ipponme to Sanbonme only, as you don't need Yonhonme or higher until you grade for Dan level anyway. I was familiar with Ipponme and Nihonme already but only a very much more vague idea of what happened in Sanbonme. The teaching of it was undertaken by a few people, and I helped also correct obvious mistakes in the first two, before learning the third.
The first two are fairly easy, and demonstrate men cut, and kote cut. The third kata teaches about tsuki, but also how to parry. All kata contain zanshin, and this in itself is very important. You can do kata, or you can practice kata. The difference between the two is that if you just do kata, you only do the motions/movements. Anyone can do this. To practice kata, you must show your intent, your spirit, your zanshin. This is much harder. Every movement you take must be strong, decisive, the kiai on the cut loud and sharp, the intensity of the look, all of this is what makes it worth doing kata. Without it, you are just swinging wood around.
The weather after Kata was turning a bit grey but it still held off and we walked downtown to Chinatown for dinner. Originally we were going to go to Ramenka, but it was really busy, so we went upstairs instead to Daruma Japanese Resteraunt. I had never been there before but a lot of people have been, one person used to be a regular since they attended a school/tutoring place above it for a while. First impressions of the place, it's a reasonable size and the furniture is quite funky. Open, and a nice relaxed atmosphere. The service is nice, though it was quite quiet so if it was busy, I don't know how much that would have changed. They have free self-serve Misoshiru (Miso soup), but if you order it, it's $1.50 (talk about a service charge eh...). The menu is quite limited, but since it is a small place, I guess it is easier for them to have a set limited menu as it makes production of the food easier and quicker. I had a chicken katsu ramen set for $9.80, which came with a medium sized bowl of ramen with a medium sized chicken katsu cut into three peices, one fake crabstick flake, seaweed and ramen in miso, a bowl of rice and two fried gyoza (dumplings) with soy vinegar already applied on them. It was pretty decent quality, not great, but also not poor. The serving size was well proportioned and I was quite full after having the ramen, rice, gyoza and drinking both ramen soup and a bowl of self-serve miso. One interesting observation though is that, they take your name when ordering, not too unusual so they can get the order delivery right, but at the cash register, it says no separate payments, but yet when you go to pay.... they ask for your name and we, all nine of us, paid separately..... ~bwuh?~
Post dinner, we wandered around a little trying to figure out what to do. Some wanted to go for drinks, but not all, and we ended up going to Norita. Norita I think I've mentioned before, is the board games cafe upstairs on Liverpool St, next to Captain Torres Resteraunt. We trooped upstairs and occupied two tables side by side. One of the group had left, so we had eight. After ordering some drinks, as our desert I guess, we took a little while to decide what to play, and ended up playing Pictionary. For those who are not familiar with the game, Pictionary is quite simple in its simple form. You are in teams of two or more (we were in teams of four), you have a deck of cards with words on them, and one person during the appropriate round must draw what the word is and the rest guess. You have one minute to get the word spoken to win that round. The more complicated explanation involves moving around a board, different colours you land on have different difficulties, and you can add complication by using a separate dice that also indicates you have to draw blindfolded, with your non dominant hand, without lifting the pen etc etc. It's quite a fun game, and really pushes both your drawing abilities and interpretation abilites. Our team lost, but it was quite a close game. Where we failed was the simultaneous challenges where both teams had to draw the same thing at the same time, and our side kept losing out by a second or so LOL, but it was quite a lot of fun. For me, I had a Green Ice blended milk tea with red bean, and it came to $6.60 including the rental cost for the game.
Post Norita, we eventually shuffled over to Live, the Karaoke place above the Korean resteraunt Min Sok Choon on Liverpool St. The bouncers asked for ID for the girls, and asked to look inside my bag, and then they wondered what we were all carrying, and were quite funny and good natured when we said wooden sword for Kendo. One of them was like, you're all carrying weapons~! and joked around a little. We all paid $5 for an hour of singing. It's Karaoke, enough said right? XD We got about half an hour of extra time because I guess it wasn't that busy yet at that time of the night. Right at the start though, some really drunk girls crashed our room and were talking incoherently before leaving again.... strange white chicks... One of the things observationally though from Karaoke is how inadequate I am linguistically. Several people could sing and read in Chinese, Japanese, and obviously English. One of them, quite talented in singing also with a very very strong voice (she also does performance and plays a variety of musical instruments, very intelligent all-rounder she is, and she bakes nice cookies too^_^) was singing English, Chinese and Cantonese, and I think she also does Japanese AND Korean.... sheeeeeeesh. And I only scrape a half decent English with a smidgeon of Chinese...... XD
After we finished up at Karaoke, we drifted once more up George St, and hung at Galaxy World a little since two people wanted to play a game or two, and then we all ended up going to Town Hall station and home for the night. It wasn't too late by a Friday Night standard, and one of the people was a little disappointed that they didn't get to drink at all haha =P But it was a fun night, if not a little moderate on the money side but not too expensive. So that was my Friday.
Best of Luck to all of those who have exams coming this week~!
Since it was exam season, the hall was now being set up for exams, which means we don't have regular training in it until after they finish. One of the other seniors had arranged for us to do Kata instead on the oval. The turnout was actually really good and we had about sixteen people turning up, and a mix of beginners, advanced beginners and seniors. Since most of the people didn't know any Kata at all, we went through Ipponme to Sanbonme only, as you don't need Yonhonme or higher until you grade for Dan level anyway. I was familiar with Ipponme and Nihonme already but only a very much more vague idea of what happened in Sanbonme. The teaching of it was undertaken by a few people, and I helped also correct obvious mistakes in the first two, before learning the third.
The first two are fairly easy, and demonstrate men cut, and kote cut. The third kata teaches about tsuki, but also how to parry. All kata contain zanshin, and this in itself is very important. You can do kata, or you can practice kata. The difference between the two is that if you just do kata, you only do the motions/movements. Anyone can do this. To practice kata, you must show your intent, your spirit, your zanshin. This is much harder. Every movement you take must be strong, decisive, the kiai on the cut loud and sharp, the intensity of the look, all of this is what makes it worth doing kata. Without it, you are just swinging wood around.
The weather after Kata was turning a bit grey but it still held off and we walked downtown to Chinatown for dinner. Originally we were going to go to Ramenka, but it was really busy, so we went upstairs instead to Daruma Japanese Resteraunt. I had never been there before but a lot of people have been, one person used to be a regular since they attended a school/tutoring place above it for a while. First impressions of the place, it's a reasonable size and the furniture is quite funky. Open, and a nice relaxed atmosphere. The service is nice, though it was quite quiet so if it was busy, I don't know how much that would have changed. They have free self-serve Misoshiru (Miso soup), but if you order it, it's $1.50 (talk about a service charge eh...). The menu is quite limited, but since it is a small place, I guess it is easier for them to have a set limited menu as it makes production of the food easier and quicker. I had a chicken katsu ramen set for $9.80, which came with a medium sized bowl of ramen with a medium sized chicken katsu cut into three peices, one fake crabstick flake, seaweed and ramen in miso, a bowl of rice and two fried gyoza (dumplings) with soy vinegar already applied on them. It was pretty decent quality, not great, but also not poor. The serving size was well proportioned and I was quite full after having the ramen, rice, gyoza and drinking both ramen soup and a bowl of self-serve miso. One interesting observation though is that, they take your name when ordering, not too unusual so they can get the order delivery right, but at the cash register, it says no separate payments, but yet when you go to pay.... they ask for your name and we, all nine of us, paid separately..... ~bwuh?~
Post dinner, we wandered around a little trying to figure out what to do. Some wanted to go for drinks, but not all, and we ended up going to Norita. Norita I think I've mentioned before, is the board games cafe upstairs on Liverpool St, next to Captain Torres Resteraunt. We trooped upstairs and occupied two tables side by side. One of the group had left, so we had eight. After ordering some drinks, as our desert I guess, we took a little while to decide what to play, and ended up playing Pictionary. For those who are not familiar with the game, Pictionary is quite simple in its simple form. You are in teams of two or more (we were in teams of four), you have a deck of cards with words on them, and one person during the appropriate round must draw what the word is and the rest guess. You have one minute to get the word spoken to win that round. The more complicated explanation involves moving around a board, different colours you land on have different difficulties, and you can add complication by using a separate dice that also indicates you have to draw blindfolded, with your non dominant hand, without lifting the pen etc etc. It's quite a fun game, and really pushes both your drawing abilities and interpretation abilites. Our team lost, but it was quite a close game. Where we failed was the simultaneous challenges where both teams had to draw the same thing at the same time, and our side kept losing out by a second or so LOL, but it was quite a lot of fun. For me, I had a Green Ice blended milk tea with red bean, and it came to $6.60 including the rental cost for the game.
Post Norita, we eventually shuffled over to Live, the Karaoke place above the Korean resteraunt Min Sok Choon on Liverpool St. The bouncers asked for ID for the girls, and asked to look inside my bag, and then they wondered what we were all carrying, and were quite funny and good natured when we said wooden sword for Kendo. One of them was like, you're all carrying weapons~! and joked around a little. We all paid $5 for an hour of singing. It's Karaoke, enough said right? XD We got about half an hour of extra time because I guess it wasn't that busy yet at that time of the night. Right at the start though, some really drunk girls crashed our room and were talking incoherently before leaving again.... strange white chicks... One of the things observationally though from Karaoke is how inadequate I am linguistically. Several people could sing and read in Chinese, Japanese, and obviously English. One of them, quite talented in singing also with a very very strong voice (she also does performance and plays a variety of musical instruments, very intelligent all-rounder she is, and she bakes nice cookies too^_^) was singing English, Chinese and Cantonese, and I think she also does Japanese AND Korean.... sheeeeeeesh. And I only scrape a half decent English with a smidgeon of Chinese...... XD
After we finished up at Karaoke, we drifted once more up George St, and hung at Galaxy World a little since two people wanted to play a game or two, and then we all ended up going to Town Hall station and home for the night. It wasn't too late by a Friday Night standard, and one of the people was a little disappointed that they didn't get to drink at all haha =P But it was a fun night, if not a little moderate on the money side but not too expensive. So that was my Friday.
Best of Luck to all of those who have exams coming this week~!
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