Wednesday, May 6, 2009

May 2009: 2nd day in Heidelberg - Germany

On my second day in Heidelberg I joined the Kendo practice at the Ken Zen Kan Dojo.
I have to admit that, even if I like a lot practicing Iaido, I feel more comfortable when I enter in a Kendo Dojo. This happened also at Ken Zen Kan Dojo, with the other advantage that many persons were speaking English and I meet also two Italians. I was also very happy to know that my German understanding is sufficient to practice Kendo :-)
It was nice to see that there were also many beginners, that are important to make a Dojo growing.
The training started with a warm up followed by a quite heavy suburi.
After we put on the men and started kion focusing on zanshin, practicing big men, kote and focusing on the right way to make do. After we move to counter attack techniques: kote-nuki men and men-nuki do. The lesson passed very smoothly and we finished with mawari geiko. This was an extremely enjoyable part, very clean and challenging fightings. At the end I did keiko with Frank, the Iaido instructor, and he is a nito user. This was a nice opportunity to test my jodan. It is about an year that I am practicing jodan, as side training in Torino, but I am quite a beginner, however to fight against nito in judan is really difficult, therefore I switched to jodan. It was a nice fight, difficult to find space within the nito but interesting and enjoyable. At the end of a refreshing shower the President of the Dojo was so kind to bring me back to the EMBL Hotel.
It seems that it is possible that I will be part of other workshops in Heidelberg and it will be a great opportunity to practice again at Ken Zen Kan.

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