Boojie blues

A bit about training stuff.
Before I go into some whining: I really enjoy the trainings in RI's dojo. There is one thing only that I miss - the rough play. Sometimes I like it really rough ;-) But lately I started playing with B. this hard way and the good thing is that she also enjoys it :-) lucky me :-)
I. can always show something new and we learn all the kata systematically, on a much better organized way than how I learned it before. In the same time I have a lot of freedom exploring each one and see how and why exactly that particular kata works that way. I have to use my brain. This is something I needed very much. No guys, not brain, I have that by default :-P but the fact that I have to use it :-) Anyway.
I am going to attend Thomas F's seminar in Brussels in two weeks. I go with K., the Iranian guy from Kutaki, and also Cs. will accompany me. He wants to meet Jan The Giant and also to see Brussels.

This is the good stuff. And now comes the whining.
I am so very much fed up with the political bullshiting in Hungary, it's really so tiring. You just can not get away from it, it finds you anywhere. There are two major "parties" who don't talk to each other, and I've been trying to build a bridge between them in the pas few years. But it seems that they are not mature enough for this yet. They always destroy the bridge and almost make me fall too.
It was the same this week. So Yesterday I said it was enough. It was the last time that I tried to make peace. No matter how high level instructors they are, they are simply not mature enough to make peace and work together. Instead they just keep bringing up the past and have a bath in their own hurt feelings. Then they run to their kindergarten teachers and complain about the other.
And when you talk to them, if you don't talk bad about the opposite party, they treat you as an enemy. It is really so immature and childish. But come on, these are adult men over the age of 30! Men... if the whole thing would depend on you, probably humanity would have died out by now, you make so many wars simply out of pride.
Anyway. I will still help anyone who asks me for any help, but won't "offer" my help anymore. It is not worth the nerves.

Strange, since I got my new rank I was approached from the most various directions with the request of teaching people. Hmm... on one hand it fawns on me, but on the other hand I can not take it seriously. Before having this rank no one on earth asked me to teach - okay, except for women. I got several requests from other female buyu to teach them because -as they told me- they learned more when they were training with me. But no one else wanted me to teach anything. And now, all of a sudden, in the past 6 months I got a lot of requests from different individuals (buyu and to-be-buyu) to help them and was approached from 3 different sources to teach regularly in a dojo/club. It makes me smile but really :) People often judge only by the shell, before examining closely and deeply whom they are learning from.

New year, new position?

I have not been able to blog lately as you may have noticed. Things kept me really busy at work - I got so burnt out every day after work that by the time I got home I was not able to sit down and type anything.
Our uni has just started setting up an e-learning server and beside sharing the course materials with the students, the depts would like to deliver some of the courses/classes online. E-learning is just getting more and more popular in Hungary, so I guess cog-wheel caught us too.
Our Linux guru said that there is a free built in module in the Linux server, Moodle, which is an e-learning software, so he activated that. And who has to test it and tweak it? Who? Me of course, because our unit (summer uni) will use it first, starting from this spring.
There are only a very few things that can make me loose my temper, but Moodle managed to do it to me. By the end of last week I was about throwing out the whole pc through the window of our 3rd floor office.
The thing is that our Linux guru said he had no time to test how this module works so I had to do it. By this Friday I got much more familiar with the whole thing and managed to find out by what laws this software works. I risk saying: I started to like it.

Anyway. It's still better and more creative than my job at the computer unit. I thought I've been working for my uni for 10 years now but this morning I had to realize that it's really been only 9 years. Hmm.... 9, as the special number. Now I understand why I feel the need of moving further.

By the way, I got a job offer. I've accidentally met the director of the IT company who provides IT service for our university and we had some common projects in the past few weeks - even now we work on one particular project.
He asked me if I wanted to join them as a project manager. Hmm... at first I was very surprised because this was the first time that I was asked to accept a better position and it was not me who run after it. I said "why not? Let's talk about it". So we agreed to make an appointment soon and I listen to what they can offer and what I would have to do in return.
Who knows - maybe if they offer me a much better paying position I may even postpone my plans with going abroad to work and I can stay in Hungary. We'll see.

Go oriental

Last night I've been up until 3:00 a.m. The hot Ylang-Ylang bath relaxed me completely, after then I always feel like living in the world of the 1001 Nights Tales. :-) I love oriental scents, from this aspect I am quite a romantic person I think :-)
Today I crawled out of my bed at 11:00 a.m., but only because I have to finish cleaning up the flat until family returns from their meditation weekend in our retreat center.

I also have to finish with the first section of my reading material for the course I am auditing at the uni where I work at. It's about occult theories and practices between antiquity and renaissance. We have classes on Tuesdays and it started last week. It's a very interesting course but has some challenging readers concerning the language. It's not only that the whole course is in English (like everything at our uni), but also that at some parts it's a highly philosophical text, sometimes written in old style (like Plato's discussions and such). So it's a real challenge to get it. Luckilly the professor can explain things quite well. So we'll see how the course will evolve by the end of the semester. If it will be interesting enough, I'll register for the Spring Semester as well.
So today I finish cleaning up the flat and then jump into the reading stuff.

Tomorrow I won't have time for reading as I will go and visit DJH's training in Butokugan, and if everything goes well, RI, my buddy whose dojo I train at now comes with me.
I've been to Butokugan in December (or November), when we consecrated the venue.
It's a really impressing complex built for Budo trainings and events. Next time I'm there I'll take pictures. It's a really wonderful and unique place. Too bad their website does not work at the moment.
So we're going to beat up each other there a bit and probably have some fun as well :-).

Sooo, time to go and cook some yummy lunch and clean up the flat.

I'll write about the training on Tuesday sometime.

Crazy beginning

These past two weeks were crazy like hell.
I've had heaps of works in the office and after work I usually had meetings after meetings - stuff that I did not have time for in December cos of the holiday rush.
In the meantime it turned out that maybe the Kungfu Master can have an opportunity to study hopefully for free at the uni where I work, so he applied. I hope he can make it. It's pretty disappointing when you have to postpone your studies for years and years and after then for more years again just because you can't save the money for the high tuition fee and for your living costs. Not to mention that you're ain't getting any younger meanwhile. So at least it's a chance for him.

Also, this past week I met K., the Iranian guy from the Village of the Nine Waterfalls. He studies here in Budapest for about 4-5 years and I helped him to find a dojo in Budapest. Now he trains at a student of my former instructor, A. The meeting was kind of due as we never managed to meet in person since he entered the country, despite that I helped him a lot with training and everyday life related info. Anyway, he seems to be a young and tame guy, mixed with some amount of naivity.
He wants to publish a website about how ninjutsu in Iran is a fake one and such. I told him to be very careful with this and did not recommend him publishing this site (neither did my former instructor). But it'll be his decision at the end, so, that's it.
Anyway, he comes with us in a month to attend T.F's seminar in Belgium, organized by my giant pal, Jan :-P
I am really looking forward to it, as I have heard many good things about T. I also want to ask him about teaching children. I saw some very fascinating video on the net recorded in his dojo where they taught basics of BBT for children. I liked it.

So this year's theme is Kukishinden Ryu. Just when I started getting used to the feeling of Shinden Fudo Ryu, now I have to approach the whole thing from a totally different angle.
The movement itself is very.. hmm... strange or uncomfortable. Last training I even got pissed off for a second because of my own clumsiness, but it flew away quickly :) It's a real challenge to catch the feeling. Now I am thinking about how to simulate yoroi without actually buying a real one. I have a bulletproog vast at hand but that's not the same as wearing a yoroi. I still have to think a bit about it.

Tomorrow more, but now...
Now I feel a burning urge to sink into the bath-tube, full of hot water, spiced up with a bit of Ylang-Ylang oil :-) Hmmm... a real pleasure for body and soul...