Wednesday, June 25, 2008

(mainly about) 2nd Brunei Interschool Kendo Workshop

I have no idea how to start this post. Probably with this, OMG I'm in the newspaper! DD: It was for the LiveWIRE thing. I didn't really care, but damn, a lot of people noticed. Haha. Many of them went, "I SAW YOU IN THE PAPER." It made me realise that people actually read the newspaper. Wow.

Secondly, the awesome Kendo workshop male kendoka from our school showed up. His name is Hafiz. Thanks, kiddo! (He has a nickname now. It's Chip. Because he looks like a chipmunk. Riku and I unofficially adopted him ) Ramzul is not taken into account because he only attended the workshop for one day.

Since a few days have passed, the "excitement and enthusiasm" to talk about it is gone, but I definitely miss those three days. Let me see if I can actually remember.

I met a lot of new people, most of them PAP Masna girls. (Don't get me wrong, Riku XDDD) Also the Belait kendokas. Speaking of which, Riku, Hafiz and ! had lunch at Excapade with two of them, Raion and Zul a.k.a Kyozen (as to not confuse between him and Zool-senpai) Riku dubbed the lunch Brunei-Belait Kendoka Bonding Moment! Yeah, so there were only five of us. Consider us as representatives from the two districts.

Another bright side of this workshop was that I also get to meet the kendokas I haven't seen a long loooong time. Mainly due to my absence in the dojo. Haha. Sure, my fault. Edie (I still haven't figured out the spelling to his name), Adelyn, Raito, Adee/Adi/D (another name I'm not sure with)...(siapa lagi ah? XD) Far was there too. She just dropped by though, as she has to go to work. T___T

As usual, we were divided into groups. I... don't really remember what we did. XD We were mainly doing the basics, like ashi sabaki and the cuts, as well as the dojo etiquettes(Yes, I spelled that WITHOUT the spell checker MUAHAHA). Actually, I'm surprised to see that some of them still step over the shinais when passing. D:

We did kata in the afternoon session. We did ipponme kata. I've learnt that COUNTLESS times already, although I have actually forgotten how to do it in the beginning of the year, but I did quite fine, I guess. We were taught kata #2 and #3 on the last day, by a senpai whom I shall only refer to as "Rimba guy"-senpai. *rolls eyes*
I forgot wah, you see. He call me "MS girl" bah, you see. I got annoyed bah, you see. You not annoyed, issit? I berry annoyed like strawberry, you see. I berry lame, oso, you see. You still not annoyed, issit?

The highlight of the day (of all 3 days, in fact) was the kendo war. More known as Sponge Shinai war. Less known as Sponge war, for fear of being confused with the sponges you use to clean your dishes, as well as to avoid copyright issues with Spongebob Squarepants. It's basically the best part of the workshop, the most-awaited. It would start with two groups battling against each other, bogu-less, armed with shinais/bokkens made of sponge so that the impact of the hit won't be as big. You get knocked out of the game by being hit on the head ('men' cut), wrists ('kote' cut) and abdomen ('Do' cut). But you see, in the real fight, rules were basically ignored. Like me, I got bruises on my cheeks, my upper arms and my back. They friggin bashed. No one-on-one fights. Heck, I had to face 4-5 guys on my own sometimes. The winning team is the team with the most survivors. Then, the winning team will fight against the seniors. As in, you know, THE seniors. The juniors obviously outnumbered the seniors, like a 1:5 ratio, I think. But we lost on the first day, The seniors just hit their way through us. On the second day...we decided to cheat. Instead of a one-on-one, we decided to go ten-on-one. It was no longer war. It was BULLYING. And oh boy, did we have fun. XD Same goes to the third day, except on the third day, there was one final battle where nobody gets knocked out/dies. You can go crazy and hit as much as you like. At least I think that was it, because that's what I did. XD

And there we go. I didn't take any pictures, too lazy to take out my phone. So, I decided to it the slacker's way and steal pictures from others. And eevn then I couldn't be bothered to show all. Haha. Here are the group photos (of course with me in it XD)

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All stolen taken from bruneikendo.blogspot.com, uploaded by various people (see, at least I credit, even though I have no idea who uploaded which XD)



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