Day 24 -- Review, Realign

We're in the middle of what is known here as Golden Week. It's the time of the year when the Japanese calendar has a built-in vacation, and it's traditionally been a time when my schedule is packed. Here's the review of Golden Week mid-action:

Friday, I didn't post because although it wasn't a holiday, it was a special day for the schools in the area, something like an area-wide inter-high school competition day. I went out to Tamana High School to watch the swim team. Our swim team has one member, but she's a really strong swimmer. She also has an interest in English and will be an exchange student in our sister city Clarinda, Iowa, next year. She took first place for women. Woohoo!

Saturday, Sakabe Sensei invited me to participate in his weekly Aikido marathon, in which he teaches four 1 1/2 hour classes at a community center in Kumamoto City in the same day. My allergies were terrible, really distracting, and I felt like I had a big cloud floating inside my head, but I trained the four classes anyway. There was a fifth class, but I couldn't go because it was farther away and I had made some plans for dinner with someone. Sakabe Sensei had some injury to his knee from class the night before, and he was limping, but he still taught all the classes. I have to say, I was pretty useless in helping him, sadly. He'd asked me, sort of jokingly, to teach the children's class in the afternoon, but I think he was actually serious. Me, I was thinking, "What, is he nuts?! I just started this, I don't understand it. How could I teach it?" So I just participated and felt a little foolish because I was about at the same level as these six and seven year-olds, even though I was wearing a black belt.

The mats were really hard, so I got a couple of bruises on my shoulders from rolling. My falling form had become so sloppy from lack of discipline in the recent years, and I'm really paying for it now. The emphasis in the falling in this school is on back rolling out of most everything. I have to take much more time to retrain my body to do this kind of fall. I'm wondering how I can do it. I'm tired of retraining myself. That's the problem with changing teachers--they each need you to do it their way. The thing is that I really want to do it this school's way as opposed to any other school. I just need a little more energy and time. And I wonder how I'll manage when I come home...

Sunday, I had some time to relax, and had dinner with a friend. Having relaxing time with friends, time to talk and chill out and have meaningful communication is rare, and I treasured that time with her.

Finally, yesterday, I went with a different friend to the renowned Arita Pottery Festival in Saga Prefecture. I've heard it's one of the most popular pottery festivals in the world. You can find any kind of Japanese dish or bowl you could dream of, in any price range from around 50cents (for nice stuff!) to hundreds of thousands of dollars(zillions of yen). There are hundreds of stands out in the streets, and behind them, hundreds of stores are displaying their unique styles. Kilns from all over Japan show up here; porcelin is also here. My third time here in three years, I stuck to my budget like glue and had a very nice time shopping and looking.

You guys, I'm getting off track in these last days of "30 days early." I'm still arriving early, which is good, but I'm getting up later and later. I've been skipping parts of the routine, like fixing my hair nicely, or something like that. I want to start again as if I'm on Day 1. But it's Day 24, and I was 8 minutes early.

Tomorrow, I've got one more shot to wake up refreshed and lively, and be early before I go off to Yakushima for 3 days. Yakushima is the nature-island that evoked the imagery that can be found in the movie Princess Mononoke. I'll go with Sakabe Sensei and two other Aikido fellows.

Total minutes early: 202