Mind matters

Got up at 10 am. Aaah! Refreshing! Except that I dreamt about zombies and had to kill a few of them, as Al Bundy! It was the Bundy family that was on the run from them.

We also traversed Mt Everest and ended up in a roman built kathedral type of thingie with water running in the middle. Somehow Captain Picard decided it would be a good spot to wash, so he, and a lot of other good looking men, took of their clothes and dabbed themselves with the water. Nice dream I say!

Then I was treated to lots of food again. Chili on carne this time. De-elicious! I didn’t eat so much, but I stayed full the whole day nevertheless.

Mari, me and the boys took a sightseeing cruise through Vansbro. Not much to see, except that I realised that I had driven past there a couple of times, when driving up to Sälen, a ski-resort. I didn’t see it until we came into town from the right direction!

We also visited Karamellfolket (Caramel people), who had an incredible 516 different sorts of candy to choose from! I ended up buying 3 kg of candy for 210 kr. I thought it would be a good idea to bring it to the other uchi deshis*!

Around 3 pm Pär arrived and we left for Torsby, the start of a intensive week of training.

We arrived in Torsby around 4.30 pm and were greeted by most of the other uchi deshis. We were supposed to be 9 people, but one got his finger caught between a rock and big stone (rock and a hard place, anyone?), and another person from Linköping e-mailed that he wouldn’t make it. So we’re only 7 now. These are the brave seven:

• Me, Mika, from Linköping
• Maria from Torsby
• Martina from Torsby
• Christina from Kalhäll outside of Stockholm
• Zafer from Jönköping
• Claes from Halmstad
• Patrik from Halmstad

Since I’m the highest ranking person here, with my 1 dan, I’m automatically appointed the duties and responsibilites of Dojo Sempai, which means I work as a conduit between our Sensei, Lars-Göran, and the uchi deshi group.

For me it’s both and honour and a burden! I’ve never been Dojo Sempai before, but I think I’m fully qualified for the job, which is to see to that we have cooking teams (toban) and make sure everything runs smoothly. Not a hard task when you have a great bunch of people like this. The burden is that I was looking forward to a week without too much responsibilites, but I think I’ll find a nice balance between goofing off and doing chores

We had our first training today, and Lasse taught a lot of basics, with some throwing involved. The warm up nearly killed us! As I feared I got to act as uke (the one being thrown) many times. Which is actually a good thing! But I haven’t seriously trained for a couple of weeks so I feel totally out of form. I was panting a lot at the end of the class.

Tomorrow we get up at 7 am. Training starts at 7.30 am to 8.30 am. The schedule for the week looks like this:

Monday: 07.30-08.30, 12.00-13.00, 18.30-19.45
Tuesday: 07.30-08.45, 17.00-18.00, 18.00-19.00
Wednesday: 07.30-08.30, 12.00-13.00, 18.30-19.45
Thursday: 07.30-08.45, 17.00-18.00, 18.00-19.00
Friday: 07.30-08.30, 12.00-13.00, 16.00-17.15, 18.00 PARTY!

After the training I dished out some information, we decided that we would try to go to a sauna on tuesday, I divided everyone into cooking teams and put them in charge of the different days during the week and then we went into town to eat pizza (I didn’t buy more than a diet coke since I was still full, but I gobbled some left over kebab from Martina).

Afterwards we went to the uchi deshi common room and played a game called Geni. Martina was the first one to reach 10 points! We we’re all extremely happy that the game ended since it took nearly 2 hours to play. Me and Zafer discussed Dr Who, Red Dwarf and Stanislav Lem during the game. Seems we’re both computer and sci-fi nerds

Patrik tried to convince us that the moon landing never took place. Me and Zafer presented our arguments against that particular conspiracy theory. Patrik is under 20, so I gather it’s a phase he’s going through, likes to question authorities and “well known facts”. I think we can straighten him out during the week

I also learned a couple of words from the Värmlands-dialect:

• Kröttrer - Cows
• Sö - Sheep, Söer - Several sheep
• Joäpple - Potatoe
• Grönn - Think about (grunna)

Well, time to go to bed. Another post will be coming monday night! Sleep tight and don’t let the beg buds bite!

* Uchi deshi means “inside student” in japanese, which is a student living together with a sensei, to train and to do the chores sensei deems appropriate

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