Pictures

Here's a picture of "Bryn Senshusei" taken when we went out one night:

 And here are some pictures that I took near the guest house where we are staying:

The training is going well.  It's very difficult but we are definitely improving.  Yanagihara Shidoin has us doing 400 sit ups to begin each of his classes, and we were also introduced to the famous usagi tobi, or "bunny hops", last week.  My bunny hop performance was very poor but I am determined to improve as the course goes on.  We were very fortunate last week because James Senshusei provided a whispered translation for a number of classes.  This was extremely helpful but got shut down when I formally asked one of the teachers if this was OK.  After consideration, Sonada Shihan concluded, "you should be able to understand Japanese."  Alas, this was a mistake.  As my Dad used to say, it's always easier to apologize than to get permission. 

I've been thinking about my Dad a lot over the past week.  During his life, he armed me with three especial tools that help me every day in my pursuit of this course: 
-The first was a genuine appreciation and affection for other cultures.  My Dad's whole family was this way.  When he was growing up they travelled all over the world and he lived variously in Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Johannesburg, and the languages of these and other countries were often heard in the repartee that would go on at family gatherings. 
-The second is patience.  Training in Aikido is a painstaking process that goes on for a lifetime and does not provide quick results.  You have to have a lot of faith that what you are doing has meaning and that the work will pay off in the end.  Because of the particular trials and experiences of his own life, my Dad developed an incredible amount of patience, and I feel that some of this was bestowed upon me. 
-And finally, and perhaps most importantly, he gave me my sense of humor, without which I should have gone mad long ago...

Incidentally, I was mistaken in my previous prediction about suwari waza beginning last week.  We still haven't gotten into the hard-core kneeling stuff yet.