Seolbong Cherry Blossoms

On Saturday we had a Hapkido belt test. This was no normal belt test. For one thing, we had no idea what the not heaven was going on. Together with our sister gym, we rented a huge hall and had all the students do their stuff with some important people watching. Seems to me it was more of a show off than anything else.

We only started practicing some of the black belt kicks on Monday. Some of the kick sequences were up to 6 kicks long with 3 kinds of spinning kicks. If you consider that most of us Teachers are still struggling with single spinning kicks, then you begin to see the problem involved. Sadly enough, on the day of the test our biggest problem was not that we couldn’t do the kicks, but more that we didn’t know the order and could not follow the Korean instructions.

The whole things ended up being a royal intercourse up as far as us waegoogs were concerned. I thought I would let the other students do their moves and then quickly follow, but the instructor let us go through everything so quickly that I never had time to catch up, and thus was unable to do most things in any recognisable way. The other Teachers in front of me didn’t even have the luxury of waiting because of where they were positioned on the floor. It was just plain embarrassing.

There is one good thing that I can say of my own performance. I nailed the forward jump fall without any injury. The Man Who Will Not Be Named claimed he knew how to do this move. Apparently, when I missed my one day of training last month, everyone managed to do about 50 of these flips, so he is really good at is. Interesting that the one time I saw him try to do it, AFTER that one day of, he looked like a retard. I am not claiming I am good, but at least I have the sense to admit when I suck, and that is a good thing because I suck most of the time. Buddy tries to give the impression that he is Bruce Lee or something, but the 50 rolls thing crossed the line in to straight out lying. I know that they didn’t do any falls on that day because I would have been told. It is not the easiest thing and the others would have bragged that I missed my chance and that they are now going to make me look bad. It’s all in good humour. Anyway…

After this weird hapkido thing we went to Seolbong Park to have a look at the cherry blossoms. I was quite surprised by the amount of trees there. When they grow up it will look really good. Here are a few pictures for your viewing pleasure.