(A post about aikido, feel free to skip if not interested)

About ukemi

I've been thinking about ukemi a lot for at least 9 months now. For me, it is a hugely underestimated (and underexplained) part of aikido. In our dojo, everyone tells you how to do waza. That you have to move like this, put your feet like that, move your hips this way, irimi here, kaiten there, whatever. But quite often people don't tell you how to receive so that you are not actually passive (not giving any energy into that) and at the same time you are not resisting too much.

About my ukemi and being hurt

I still don't know a lot, and unfortunately my body is a combination of a bit stiff, a bit slow, and also sort-of-strong (for a girl, that it). I am somewhat slow in my reactions, and while I am working on it, it's not easy for me to be 100% reactive all the time and do everything right.

Quite a few people mistake this - a lack of knowledge and experience - for being an overly resistive and not-at-all-helpful uke. Basically and a*hole. I've been hurt a number of times because of this. Because sometimes I don’t know, so I do something ‘funny’, people misinterpret it, their frustration rises, and they force the technique by violence.

It happens to everybody, and as ashamed as I am of this, it happens to me, too.

What I find interesting is that people then continue being violent, right up to the final pin, which they do very nastily – and hurt me even more. My wrists in particular are taking a lot of this.

When I don't know, I try to 'honestly follow'. I move 'when I feel it', but sometimes I just ‘don't feel it', or I 'feel it later than would be ideal’. And people misunderstand and force it rather than doing something which would guide me a bit more clearly.

I’ve heart that aikido is like a dialogue. In this analogy, I feel like a person with a slightly impaired hearing: I understand about 70% of times, but sometimes people just have to be clear and loud enough for me to get it, without actually shouting at me or treating me like an idiot, and that is probably challenging for them. I suspect this comes from my way of exploring: again I don't move just because someone tells me to, I need to feel the incentive. I don't like to fall when supposed to (as opposed to falling when aikido happens) because that gives me personally nothing, no understanding what happened with my body and my balance, no understanding of aikido and physics and the universe. So I don't and then again I am told I am such a bad uke it's not even possible.

Update on airports. We landed on Ldn City the other day. The immigration was okay; the amount of silly walking around was zero; approx. 20 min after landing, you can be in DLR, heading to London.

Verdict: if it was cheaper, it would be 10/10. For business flights, it is 10/10. For private flights, it's difficult because it's just so expensive... :(

Side note about Rotterdam The Hague Airport. We flew City --> Rotterdam The Hague. City is funny, but Rotterdam The Hague Airport is even funnier, it looks like it has two gates less and it's just a cute little airport. With good coffee and good sandwiches!

I just realized how much I like little airports. You don't have to walk miles, you don't spend 30 min taxiing through the airport in the plane before getting anywhere near the take off point, you don't have to travel miles by train, ... Me gusta!

Saturday adventure, which involves Paddington, canals, house boats, industrial landscape, Bakerloo Line, and a skate park:

We decided to go have a look at Little Venice and surrounding area. When we first got to London, we had a decent chance of going to live there; it didn't happen after the potential flat mates turned us down, but that's different story (of Skype viewings and stupid real estate agents).

So we went by Bakerloo Line to Edgware Road, and started by a classy lunch in a classy American-style diner next to Paddington Basin, with a burger, a pizza, and two pints of Pilsner Urquell (ohh ahh the pleasure). And guess what, even the 'ordinary' burger, pizza and beer were much better than most of the things you can have in the most expensive restaurants in East or South London. It's just a question of money I guess.

You see, Paddington Basin looks like one of the more expensive, more posh places in London, not the same style as Chelsea, but just very obviously expensive. Perhaps less 'aristocratic' than Chelsea and more 'expat'? I don't know. But you just can smell money from that place, the pretty houses, the clean streets, the greenery, the water which is crystal clear and with no rubbish on the bottom of the basin.

So we walked from Paddington Basin towards Little Venice (which has a very Parisian feeling, especially in rainy winter), and then past this lovely boats-everywhere place to... Willesden Junction.

Little Venice looks less posh than Paddington Basin, but still reasonably posh, and reasonably expensive. More relaxed maybe. There are still nice clean streets, trees, and stuff. And obviously the boats. The water is not so polished as in Paddington Basin, but it's still nice and clean, no oil, no rubbish, just some 'wild' fowl, and cafés in some of the boats. A nice place to hang out in the summer I guess.

If you walk along the canal a bit further, you see that the landscape changes gradually. Suddenly there are less nice houses and less well-maintained house boats with smoke coming from their little chimneys. (The Paddington Basin and Little Venice boats are inhabited and well maintained and obviously also cosy warm places, despite being boats, on water, in the middle of winter.)

You get more council estates (...if you live in London for at least two weeks, you can tell a council estate, I assure you) - initially just one, then another one, then two... You get the picture.

You get more boats which look less than pristine, and gradually more and more rubbish, in the water as well as on the banks. You see more boats which use some slightly dodgy / smelly stuff to burn. And so on. In combination with drizzle and early February light, it looked very post-apo and post-industrial!

You also get more and more weed smell, and more of these people who look like youth gang. More mud and less nice cobblestones. Less of well maintained high rise buildings, and more of apparently poorer homes, with no green stuff on their concrete gardens.

Then, homes gradually give way to industrial architecture and warehouses. And some rail stuff. A lot of rail stuff in fact; it looks like one of the biggest rail gathering I've ever seen in this country.
There is also more rubbish, beer cans, cider cans, disposable coffee cups, pieces of furniture, and toilets. (I am not kidding. We have seen remnants of at least two plastic toilets. Seriously!)

Because it was raining, and it was cold, and it was not a nice walk any more, we decided to go to Underground / Overground station of Willesden Junction.

First train to arrive was 'a London Underground service to Elephant and Castle', aka Bakerloo Line. So we boarded the train. (Note. Have you ever noticed how absurdly small the Bakerloo trains are? Fun fact: Willesden Jct has a normal railway platform, and you actually have to bend and make a step down to board a Bakerloo train. Which from the normal size platform looks like a doll train or something. You often can tell that the train is small when you travel through the city, but compared to a grown-up platform, it's just striking.)

We thought that in 30 min, we'd be home.

Nope!

Next stop, Kensal Green, and the infamous 'we are being held at a red signal, we should be moving shortly' announcement. Shortly meant something like 15 min. Then someone finally lose patience, and as the driver explained, the signal is faulty and stuck and a security procedure was being adopted. The train started moving, then stopped abruptly (because it was moving despite the red signal!), and then, when the brakes were finally pressurized, started moving again, but only at 5 mph. The driver hoped to go 5 mph right to the next station.

Nope!

There was another red signal, and it was so close to Queen's Park that we had to obey Queen's Park people's authority. And they did not agree with us moving. Why, nobody knows. (The driver was a good guy and he kept us updated.) Another 20 min later, we finally got a go, and went to Queen's Park.

In the meantime, it was nice to see that I was not the only one p**ed off:
- There was this guy who looked like a hip hop gang member. He was making a phone call and mentioned 'a fucking red signal bullshit' (sic). I couldn't agree more!
- There was this very white-trash-looking lady. She was speaking on a phone in Polish, which I can sort of understand, and saying something like this: 'We are kurwa stuck in the Tube kurwa already for an hour kurwa not moving anywhere kurwa I am late kurwa but stuck in the Tube kurwa...' You get the idea. Then, she ended her tirade with 'Willesden Junction chuj' and that was it. (Chuj means dick, if you need to know.)

Luckily, once we reached Queen's Park, the rest of the journey was all right.

But mind you. Willesden Junction and the surroundings, oh my, it looks so... deprived...

Warning: this is not going to be interesting for anyone but people interested in trains underground. There's one more thing about the Tube I wanted to comment on, this time specifically about Northern Line.

In this funny video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4e-Al90tSs Central says that Northern is 'literally two different people'. And that is actually true.

When they made Northern, they merged two lines. One of them had narrower tunnels than the other one, so had to be widened when the lines were merged.

Now, we are left with a line which starts at Morden (southern-most Tube terminus), splits at Kennington to go via Charing Cross or via Bank, and then both rejoins and diverges at Camden Town, to go to Edgware or High Barnet (or sometimes to Mill Hill East).

And guess what. As probably each and every line in the world which splits, Northern is a huge pain in the ass for TfL.

I've heard stories about Line 13 in Paris - the light blue line which splits in a station called La Fourche (Fork) and goes to two different difficult suburbs, Clichy and St Denis. Well this direction (from the city centre to Clichy / St Denic) is not the main problem. The other one is. It's because the trains are supposed to meet at La Fourche and go alternately, one arrives from Clichy and goes to the city centre, then one from St Denis, then one from Clichy, etc. etc.

The problem is that it's not this smooth. Both suburbs are densely populated and not exactly rich. So problems happen. Every day. And trains get delayed as a result. Meaning that every time one half of the line gets stuck, the other one also gets stuck, because they are supposed to wait for the other train.

Same story apparently goes with Northern. But Northern is even more funny because it has Kennington and it has Camden Town, so there are two stations where the trains part. In Camden Town, if you want to change for a train going to the other branch than the train you are in, it's not that easy, you have to walk somewhere etc.

So what TfL did is that most of the trains go from Morden to alternate termini via the Bank branch. There are only few trains per hour to the Charing X branch.

Also, there apparently were plans to split Northern into two lines. But that would require rebuilding Camden Town, and for many reasons, this is not feasible.

The fun continues.

Speaking of Tube...:

Yesterday, when I arrived from Munich, and tried to travel from Gatwick to London, I had two mysterious experiences.

First. There were no trains to London Bridge any more, so I had to take a train to London Victoria. What happened was that we were stuck for about 13 minutes at Battersea Park (where the train was not even supposed to stop!). Reason? Our train was a 12 coach train, and they did not have any sufficiently long platform free for us at Victoria.

Like, seriously? The train was perfectly on time, and it's not that it's a random train which only runs once a year! It's every day the same thing, so how come they were surprised to the extent of having no platform ready for us? O_o

Second. From Victoria, I had to take Tube. Victoria Line to be precise. Those who read my stuff regularly know about my funny stories from Piccadilly and Central of a Friday night. Well, maybe it was because it was approx an hour earlier, but Victoria was not like that yesterday. The people were much less drunk and much more interesting than in Piccadlly / Central. They were apparently subculture people, few goths, some skinheads (not Nazi skinheads, ska skinheads), many hippies in colourful shirts, etc.

(I travelled from Victoria, southbound, if that's of any relevance.)