Day 301 - You can call me Master Han

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With a bit of trepidation and a lot of excitement in anticipation, we met up with Master Ryan (his Anglicised name) for our 3 hour taekwondo lesson. Without much experience of martial arts, or none to be precise, we didn’t really know what to make of it when we were kitted out in our rather fetching outfits and began with some stretching. This progressed to jumping, and some rather poor attempts at following our master. Then some blocking (14 different techniques quickly mastered) followed by loads of kicking, where Ed realised just how un-supple he is. He taught us a bit of self-defence, using Ed as a guinea pig; advice to potential muggers of our master is simply don’t do it. Finally we had a chance of some sparring, Gemma vs master, Ed vs master and finally Gemma vs Ed. It was all excellent fun with plenty of it captured on movie footage. We were wearing full body armour, including helmets, yet when Ed asked if our master would be okay (he’d chosen to go without a helmet) ahead of their bout he just laughed. Funny that. We (including Gemma’s mum) even got to chop wood with our bare hands which was very satisfying.

All in all a brilliant, fascinating, knackering, occasionally painful and well worthwhile 3 hours. Master Ryan concluded that we could make decent fighters, commenting in particular on Gemma’s surprising flexibility and saying Ed is very powerful. Flattery gets you everywhere and so if anyone is visiting Korea please contact us so we can put you in touch with Master Ryan.

For our final night in Seoul we went to experience some traditional Korean culture eating temple food whilst sitting on the floor (try that after 3 hours of taekwondo) and watching a display of Korean calligraphy, music and dancing. Gren somehow secured the calligraphy as a surprise present for Gemma, no doubt taking advantage of his emerging fluency in Oriental languages.

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Comments

[bonnie]

glasses...more info please
Ok you can't caption a photo "moments before Master Ryan's glasses weresmashed" and not give a little bit more... did he sit on them? did a RC plane crash into them? etc thanks enjoying your journay... peace BP NYS