purplecthulhu

We've spent the last week in some kind of superposition of altered states... part tourist in North Wales (saw Telford's Menai Bridge, Conwy Castle, the Bronze Age copper mine at The Great Orme), and part Japanese Martial Arts students at the British Aikikai Summer School at Bangor University. We weren't up to training in more than a few classes a day (lowest number 1, highest 3 in a day), so did the tourism in the gaps.

We now ache in places we didn't know we had a mere week ago.

It was fun, and hard work. There were some odd prickly moments with inadequately understood and promulgated etiquette (which were also non-uniformly enforced), there were scary moments, such as taking technique from one of the visiting Japanese sensei, and there were painful moments, which with some techniques are almost too numerous to mention but none left any lasting damage.

We got to play with our new weapons - sorry, we must now call them wooden sports training equipment so as not to worry anyone who might mistake them for, well, weapons - which was fun. And we entered the course raffle.

And guess what. I won top prize - which was free training at next year's summer school! I've never won first prize in a raffle before! The timing is a bit annoying though, since it will probably clash with the dates for next year's worldcon in Glasgow.

The joys of having too many hobbies...