Trois Epis, Basel, Kick Boxing in Mulhouse

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After getting to bed at 2am we had a rather late start to the day. I took a walk around the town cemetery and the town walls of Bergheim, while Lorenza sat in the sun reading a book.

In the late afternoon we went for a drive to the mountain resort of Trois Epis. It is a lovely little haven in the Vosges. There is also some kind of climate station there as well, but I could not work out the French explanation of exactly what it was for.

Back at our hotel, we tossed a coin to decide on tomorrow’s destination. Heads was Freiburg in Germany, tails was Basel in Switzerland. Tails it was, we would head south to Switzerland for the day. We went to bed laughing that we had such choices, considering in Australia, if we headed in any direction from home we would travel a lot of Australia before needing to decide on any other country to transit.

13th September 2004

I packed some training gear in a bag this morning, with the intention of visiting a Savate training gym in Mulhouse on our way back from Basel. I had found the contact details for the Savate club before leaving Australia and had called them to see if they would be training that night. The answer was yes, so I packed the tracksuit.

On our arrival in Basel, we found our way into a huge under ground car park complex. Unfortunately, once we were in the bowels of the complex we had no idea how to get back up to ground level. We were saved by an English guy who lives in Basel and he assured us that lots of locals got lost in that place also. He was kind enough to lead us from the parking station all the way to the centre of the city.

We had an interesting day, but decided that Basel did not stack up well compared to say Amsterdam or even Colmar. We managed to locate our car again without too much hassle (always a good idea to write down the level and parking space number if you can).

First taste of Savate

From Basel we found our way to Mulhouse (pronounced mooloose), it is a much more industrial looking place than Colmar, with a lot of ordinary looking semi-high rise apartment buildings that could do with brightening up.

Some how we managed to navigate our way to the district the training hall is in, Dornach. But, we could not locate the exact street. We decided to grab a bite at a Turkish takeaway place and asked for directions. Lucky for us one of the other patrons just happened to live in the street the gym was in, rue du Pommier. He kindly let us follow him home and pointed out the Savate gym for us.

We were very impressed with the training session. It was well organised and fast paced. Savate, also called la Boxe Française is Frances version of kick boxing. It is practiced in various forms - self defense, light sparring all the way to the full on competitive version. I was really interested to see it first hand after attending a seminar in Sydney about the sport. I have a keen interest in Martial Arts, including Karate, and was really pleased to have been awarded a minor ranking in Savate by the Australian Savate Federation after taking part in the seminar (not the usual verbal or slide show type seminar, it also involved a lot of physical training).

Rachil, the head of the group, or the “Professeur” led the 45 minute warm up, which included stretching, skipping rope, and lots of other heart pumping stuff.

Then the gym was broken into to groups, essentially the advanced students and the not so advanced were separated. Then, the next few hours were spent running through various drills, followed by about 15 minutes of sparring. The class was focuses don the sporting side of Savate and I found it incredibly interesting.

Following the sparring they did a cool down session and the class was over. A very solid 2 and a half hours or so. We got talking to some of the Savateurs, who were all very friendly.

The person with the best English skills at the gym was a very outgoing lady, Pascale. We had a good talk about Savate and also found out she is also an artist. We swapped contact details and I promised to send copies of the photos we had taken that night to Pascale. Pascale had been training at the gym 3 nights per week for 3 years and was certainly very skilled at her sport. They were all a very friendly bunch and we shared a drink and then said our farewells.

If you get a chance to see a series on Foxtel back home called “Deadly Arts” there is an episode about Savate that is worth watching. It gives a lot of background to the sport and also introduces the viewer to some of its champions.

14th September 2004

More washing and sent back a box of things we had collected along the way, including some stuff given to us for Lorenza’s folks. Could not be bothered carrying it all from here to Paris and home again, so entrusted it all to La Poste.

Had dinner again with Pierre and Claudine and were treated to a wide range of practical joke type toys they brought along. Such as wind up toy penises that vibrated across the table, etc. We had a good laugh together and it was a fitting farewell to them.

Is that all we did today? No, we also sat and had a few relaxing drinks in the afternoon in Bergheim and watched the world go by and soaked up the beautiful afternoon sun. Very strenuous!

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Photos

In Basel
good question

In Basel
bumped into a kickboxing team from Belgium

Savate
Lorenza & Pascale

Savate
Most of the class

Savate
I think they were saying your next, I hope your can box!

Wall Paper Museum
on the road to Mulhouse how interesting!