(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.)

So, there are few things I wanted to say about the Tube.

Last Sunday, we paid a visit to disused parts of Euston Station. The visit itself was shorter than I would have liked, but the accompanying info was very interesting.

I have a theory which basically says that the metro / Tube / underground / subway is a true reflection of the life in a city. It is a condensed reality if you will, a mirror of social stratification, and so on, and so on. So I made a conclusion. But to explain, I have to first explain a bit about another city with an underground transport system of comparable complexity: Paris.

I have been to Paris few times, and I quite liked the Paris Métro. It was a bit like love at the first sight. I admire the system, I like the aesthetics of the stations, I like the concept - that it's quite obvious that the system is well planned, that someone was thinking when designing the lines.

Afaik in Paris, there are four abandoned stations, and one was shifted few hundred meters away and joined with another station. Another two or three were just shifted, and two or three were repurposed as training stations or depots. There are also two stations that never opened, and two stations which have not even been properly built.

Then you see the original planning: there are lines in all expected directions. One goes north-west to south-east, two go around (one making a northern arch, one making a southern arch), one goes north-east to south-west, and so on. All screams 'planning'. All tells you 'this is what we wanted'. 'We made this on purpose.'

Last Sunday, I discovered the consequences of the fact that in London, the careful planning just didn't happen. What happened was quite the opposite: the Tube lines were dug apparently randomly (in fact it was a wild competition and no regulation thing). Result: about 60 abandoned stations, including at least one whole line - which is still there, with tunnels and everything, it's just not used. During history, stations in London appeared and disappeared, track was installed, moved and removed, lines were shifted, blended, renamed and cancelled, all seemingly randomly.

Do you see careful diagonal, circular, north-to-south etc. lines in London? Do you see planning which would allow you to close down only few stations, do you see someone actually thinking and trying to create something big, a functional system?

Nope.

In London, things just happen randomly, without planning. There's nothing which would make the system anything else than a random network of random stations and lines, with poor / funny connections, with stations appearing and disappearing, with no easy, reliable and intelligent way of getting from one place to another.

We got chaos instead. Bakerloo was much longer but for some reason was split into two, and part of it became Overground. East London line, of few stations, became Overground as well (Overground which runs underground on substantial part of its length). Northern started as three different lines. Some lines were built with smaller (narrower) tunnels which had to be later widened, or have to use small trains. Jubilee Line started as Fleet Line, and was later renamed (and the grey was made lighter) - which allegedly cost millions of pounds. Entire line was almost built and later abandoned. And so on, and so on.

So, my conclusion. The national stereotype may say that the French are disorganized and messy, while the British are accurate and organized. This is bollocks. Just look at Métro and compare it to the Tube.
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Side notes:

If anyone is interested in Paris Métro:
- The four abandoned stations are Croix Rouge, St Martin, Champs de Mars and Arsenal. They are still there, underground, faded but existing.
- The shifted station is Martin Nadaud, which is now 'blended into' Gambetta. Gambetta has exceptionally long platform for this reason. :)
- The unopened stations (which have no access other than track, no stairs or exit) are Porte de Molitor and Haxo.
- The not even built stations are La Défense - Michelet and Élysées La Défense. These two were originally planned, then a concrete box was put underground, and then the cost proved so high that the plans were abandoned, and instead of these, we got the RER A stations.
- For more info, start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_stations_of_the_Paris_M%C3%A9tro

This site is awesome: http://www.abandonedstations.org.uk/
This is also good: http://carto.metro.free.fr/cartes/metro-london/

(Next time I travel by Piccadilly Line I will be looking for York Road. (I always wondered why the travel time between King's X and Caledonian Road is twice as long as between any other two stations. Now I know.) Next time I travel Northern, I will be looking for City Road. And so on.)

Once again I find myself in Munich. It has become sort of my favourite city - every time I am here, I am here for nice / interesting / exciting things, so I just kinda like the city. :)

Anyway. They have snow here. Not a lot, but it's there. Exciting.

So, there are two things I've observed about Munich, and Europe in general.

1. It's not cold and damp in houses and flats (and hotel rooms). It's actually nice, warm and cosy in houses and flats (and hotel rooms).

We have boiler in our flat in London. We also have this Dyson oval thing which warms the air in the room. We have blankets and hot beverages. (We don't have candles because fire alarm but you get the idea.) But still our flat just does not feel quite right, quite as warm and DRY as it should.

2. The cold outside is colder (temperature-wise) but actually feels not that cold (feeling-cold-wise). I think it has to do with the humidity. In Manchester, I was freezing when it was below 5 degrees Celsius. It didn't have to be below zero or anything like that to feel totally, totally cold. Same thing in London! I even got myself the thickest Superdry Real Down coat, just to keep warm.

Here, it can be well below zero, and I am just not feeling that cold. It may be 10 degrees less than in London, and I am actually feeling too hot in my super thick coat.

Strange.

Notes on London Airports! I have now tried all of them (some of them admittedly only outbound) so I feel that I have stuff to say. There we go.

Heathrow

How big: One of the biggest in the world.

Amount of silly walking around: Moderate. Actually good when you consider the size of this airport. The only exception is getting to/from train or the Tube. That is a proper hike.

Transport to/from the airport: Airport of extremes. Heathrow Express (15 min) or Piccadilly Line (60 min). Heathrow Express is awesome but actually only goes to Paddington (so you have to do another 45 min on Tube if you don't live close to there) and stops at midnight, so if you are particularly 'lucky' with immigration, you have to take the Tube. Picc Line has the advantage of running even after midnight (at least on Fri evenings) - but can someone explain to me please why about 1/2 of the trains from Heathrow end in places like Hounslow West, Osterley etc.? How many people, on an average Friday night, go from Heathrow Terminals 1, 2, 3 to Hounslow West?

Immigration: Incredibly bad. By far the worst experience so far. Worse than Schiphol, and that airport is my sworn enemy. Expect non functioning biometric gates and 1km long queues (to show the returning British citizens a warm welcome perhaps?)

Toilets: Fine (9/10, definitely would pee there again)

Other facilities: Posh. Maybe even posher than that.

Wifi: Exists but requires signing up, therefore half way to bollocks.

Worst experience: Arrived by the last evening plane from M. the other day. The plane was delayed, we landed ca 11 pm. I spent more than 1 hour at a queue for the immigration checks. Result: I missed the last Heathrow Express. Had to go by Piccadilly Line, all the way to the city, on a Friday night. At first (up to zone 3) it was all right, then it started to be really dodgy. Dodgy but probably safe, because all the people were so drunk they could not harm anyone but themselves.

Overall satisfaction: 5/10. Don't like that much.

Gatwick

How big: Moderate. Has two terminals, North and South, linked by a little DLR-like train.

Amount of silly walking around: Excessive. Considering the size of the airport, it's absolutely insane.

Transport to/from the airport: Funny. A bit idiotic. There are trains to London Bridge or to Victoria. If you want to go to Ldn Bridge, you can use your Oyster, which is good but a bit expensive. When buying tickets (for example because you have a railcard), you have to basically know who operates the train you intend to take - so in theory you have to go, pick a train in advance and check who's running the thing. It's not that tickets valid for every train are too expensive - they do not exist. Also, during the weekdays, you can get to/from Gatwick in 40 min. However, during the weekends, the trains suddenly change into a train which, if you put a stick in the ground with a handwritten note on it, the train would stop there. So it takes a solid hour to get to London. (Not counting in the time you wait for the trains, which, with the popular game of biggest delays, can be considerable.)

Immigration: No complains. Took me less than 3 min every time I went there.

Toilets: Could be much worse (7/10)

Other facilities: Okay.

Wifi: Probably exists but I've actually never tried.

Worst experience: They lost my bag when I went to Amsterdam. The bag just stayed there at Gatwick. Which I find pretty pathetic.

Overall satisfaction: 5/10

Stansted

How big: Moderate. A bit like Manchester Airport.

Amount of silly walking around: Reasonable.

Transport to/from the airport: Stansted Express. So far so good, I love this train. OK, it costs £16.60 and takes 50 min from Liverpool Street, but name a cheap train to a London airport, I'll wait. I've taken Stansted Express several times and every time it was on time (actually a big deal in this country, trust me). Not like some other trains which stop all the time or don't even start moving 'due to shortage of staff' or for some similarly stupid reason. Also, the train stops ca 3 min from the airport terminal and all the stuff, which I find cool.

Immigration: No complains. Took me less than 3 min every time I went there.

Toilets: Fine (8/10)

Other facilities: Okay.

Wifi: Probably exists but I've actually never tried.

Worst experience: None. And that's why I like this airport so much.

Overall satisfaction: 8/10. My personal favourite (for now).

Luton

How big: Moderate.

Amount of silly walking around: Moderate to low.

Transport to/from the airport: Disaster. Travesty. There is a train (from London St Pancras / Blackfriars / City Thameslink), but that only goes to Luton Airport Parkway. And then you have to take a bus which, in about 10-15 min, takes you to the airport. The problems are obvious: i) The bus is always late, and always stuck in some traffic, no matter what. ii) You cannot stack a trainload of people with huge bags into a bus. You just cannot. iii) You have to buy train tickets to 'Luton Airport', not 'Luton Airport Parkway'. If you don't, they make you pay £2.40 or something for the ridiculous bus. On your way back, you have to get your train ticket from a pair of lousy machines just after you leave the airport - expect a lengthy queue of tourists who have no idea how to operate our super-intuitive ticket machines. iv) The people using this particular airport seem to be more stupid than at the other airports. They are apparently not intelligent enough to use a bus in any reasonable way, to board so that someone else can also board, to leave the bus quicker than in 15 minutes of total confusion, tripping over own bags, tripping over other people's bags, pushing people, etc.

Immigration: No complains. Took me less than 3 min every time I went there.

Toilets: OK (7/10)

Other facilities: Okay.

Wifi: Probably exists but I've actually never tried.

Worst experience: On my way to R., the airline staff checked our boarding passes and made us all stay in one big room with no facilities other than a drinks vending machine. It was early morning and there were several babies and small children, and there was nowhere to sit (not even for mothers with babies), and the room was too small for a planeload of people, so it was also quite crowded. So some kid started crying out of annoyance (which in my opinion was totally justified), and then the other kids joined in, and basically everyone was pissed off, and then the plane - which was the first morning plane - was 30 min late, so it all added up to a very cool beginning. (To be fair, I am not sure this is the fault of the airport. It may well be the shitty airline, Wizz...)

Overall satisfaction: 1/10. An airport to avoid.

City

How big: Small.

Amount of silly walking around: Zero.

Transport to/from the airport: DLR. It's zone 3, which is both unbelievable and awesome.

Immigration: N/A (only outbound flight so far)

Toilets: Fine (7/10)

Other facilities: Okay. They are tiny, but they have coffee and sandwiches and blueberry muffins, and what more do you need.

Wifi: Probably exists but I've actually never tried.

Worst experience: For some reason planes that would suit me seem to avoid this airport. What a shame.

Overall satisfaction: cannot be assessed because there are not enough flights to/from LCY

Southend

How big: Tiny.

Amount of silly walking around: Zero.

Transport to/from the airport: Train. Takes an hour but takes you 2 min from the terminal.

Immigration: N/A (only outbound flight so far)

Toilets: Fine (8/10)

Other facilities: Okay. There is coffee and sandwiches and even a restaurant and a bookshop, so you can fix everything there.

Wifi: Probably exists but I've actually never tried.

Worst experience: Nothing in particular.

Overall satisfaction: 7/10

Yesterday, I was flying above Europe (in a plane), and thinking. I was returning from an event which, for me, was quite an experience. I have met some European people there. Including one guy. And this guy, well, it's difficult to describe, but I guess we may become friends or something. Because we were there to do a job together, and we did, we were actually quite successful, the cooperation between us was very smooth, and it just feels like we have certain things in common, we share certain opinions, and, you know the feeling, right?

OK, so I was in this kind of mood. Something really good happened during the day, it all went very well, and suddenly I am in a plane, coming back home (with an amazing vision of landing at, like, 23.30 local time at Stansted and getting to bed at 2 am, duuuuh), and I am thinking. About life and stuff. And I realize that every trip to Europe brings me closer to the moment when I leave the UK.

Why. Because I miss Europeans. I miss normal European conversations, normal European human interaction. I mean roughly this. Usually, when I talk to a European, after few hours max I know all important stuff. I know what they like, how many kids they have, where they live, and which football club they follow. When I talk to a Brit, well... let's just say that for little more than 7 months now, I have been sitting next to a colleague (we are less than 2m apart), and I think he has two kids, because he has a picture of two kids on his desk. But I am not sure - as far as I know, they can be cousins/nieces. Because we never get any further than 'Hiya, you all right'.

See the contrast? In Europe, I meet someone next to a coffee machine, and we talk about walking dogs and world championship in skeleton and family affairs and the advantages of going to work by bike (or whatever random stuff is on our mind). In the UK, we say 'morning'. If they are particularly talkative that morning, they say something like 'it's quite cold outside'.

I know the reason why I came. I know why I still stay here. And I already know why I will leave one day.

The interruption after resumption of this blog is mostly due to my temporary relocation to Den Haag (The Hague; 's-Gravenhage). I will not talk about the reasons (apart from saying that I am here for an internship); I will share some funny facts about the Dutch and the Netherlands instead.

So.

I am a proud owner of two different bank cards. One of them is Visa and the other is MasterCard. Neither is accepted in the shops here - they insist on me using Maestro or some weird Dutch Giro card. Like I had one!

There is a beach here in The Hague. The sea looks very cold and also somewhat dirty (...sandy beach with a very long difference between high tide and low tide), but nevertheless there are people bathing, surfing, and sailing. Which looks cool.

There is not a single free public toilet on the beach. Which in my opinion is a shame.

But there are kites on the beach. Well, kites. Some of them are absolutely huge, and look incrdible in the air.

There's also a pier on the beach. And dunes. And a harbour. And if you walk a bit away, fish handling facilities. The Dutch word for fish? Vis. You can see it everywhere there.

I have seen Meisje met de parel aka The girl with the pearl earring. Btw, this is one of my favourite paintings! If you take a closer look at the painting, you can see that a) she looks like she had no teeth, b) the pearl actually looks quite metallic, and not like a pearl at all, c) she has white dots in her eyes which project above the plane of the drawing (if you know what I mean), and this makes it look not like a masterpiece, but like a cheeky thing. :)

There's a cat somewhere close to the place I stay, because it makes catty sounds. :)

The trams in the Hague are, erm, funny. When it rains, they are late. When anything else happens, they are late. They are just generally late, and that's that.

You can get an anonymous OV-chipkaart for riding the trams (and also trains in the whole country, which I consider quite clever). The tram tariff in the Hague works like this: you pay some boarding fee (...about 0.90 eur), and then something like 15 cents per km. If you change quickly enough, you don't pay the boarding fee twice. I find this ridiculously complex, and I only wonder how come that the British are not doing this. (Because the British love things which are insanely complex.)

I am killing my congitive bias here. There is a Polish shop nearby. I know the Dutch beers, so I decided to try the Polish ones. Before, I was reluctant to try, because I was a bit like, meh, Polish beer is no good compared to Pilsner Urquell. But now I've tried and I quite like it. :) My fav Polish beer so far is Perla chmielowa (orhowdoyouspellit).

I don't sleep very well here, probably because I am learning awful lot every day.

I actually do some pretty good aikido here, with a friend of mine who is a total kick-ass. I like her classes very much. :) Do you know these muay-thai, kick box, wing chun etc. guys who claim that aikido is not a real martial art because it's soft and fake and stuff? I would like them to practice with this lady. I am sure she would kick their ass 1000%.

They do good cheese here. Also, the French cheese tastes better here than across the Channel. A fiver to the person who tells me why!

The water pressure is not great. It's even worse than in Manchester (and that's something)!

There are killer stairs in my place. They are ladder-like, and they have no railings on the 'open side' (the one away from wall - where you can actually fall down). Health & safety, people!

Few shops accept Visa or MasterCard, they all want to see Maestro. OMG facepalm. :) Obviously, if you want to reload your OV chipkaart, you also need Maestro - meaning that the only place I can recharge is Den Haag Centraal. I tried elsewhere, but it ended up with me having to persuade a receptionist to pay for me with her card, and me giving her cash. O_o

Who invented this language, I don't know. It looks kinda Germanic but not quite, and it's just very funny. And it sounds even funnier than it looks!

The Hague is a nice city (especially on the second sight). However, for a Londoner, it looks like post-zombie-apocalypse. After ca 10 pm, there's nobody on the streets. Nobody. Nobody.

There is this place, Scheveningen, which is said to be a 'test city'. During the war, the Dutch were able to tell who's German based on how they pronounced the name of this place. If they pronounced the German 'Sch' (instead of 'sk'), they were clearly Germans, even if they pretended to be Dutch. Very handy if you have spies everywhere!

It is said that in Holland, nobody uses curtains. Well, ok, they don't, but they use these stickers on their windows which make the windows only translucent, not transparent. They probably call it privacy, but I call it cheating.

Bikes. Bikes everywhere. What's more Dutch? :) :)

Northern talk v London talk: that is something worth a very serious scientific research. :) People in the North tend to talk differently from the Londoners, and it's not just a matter of accent.

What I haven't heard since moving to London:
- ta (instead of thanks or thank you)
- easy peasy
- pants (instead of trousers)
- dinner (instead of lunch) and tea (instead of dinner)
- brew (for tea - drink)

What the Londoners seem to use far less than the Northerners:
- fair enough
- cheers

What the Londoners say and the Northerner would never say:
- pudding (meaing dessert - it was explained to me that it comes from posh boarding schools - so an institution poor Northerners don't even think of attending)

I think there are more words / expressions to follow. :)

O-O-OK, maybe one more thing I wanted to talk about. The obvious one. The Obvious One.

So. Last June 23rd, on the referendum night, I went to sleep as usual in our little cosy Manchester flat. I briefly woke up at around 4 am and wanted to happily go back to sleep, but then - I realised - The Results Are Coming. Suddenly I was wide awake. And checking BBC, obviously.

By 6 am, it was clear, the result climbed over 50%. The husband also woke up briefly at that time. I showed him my phone screen. He did not wake up at first - he was like, yeah yawn, but suddenly he was like, what? And fully awake.

Friday morning was pretty post-apo. It was like going to work through a ghost town. Manchester was strongly pro-remain, and the few people wandering the streets looked like zombies. At work, at least two of my bosses were crying. People looked like something fundamental was taken away from them - like a flood or fire took their house.

Since then, the first shock is gone, but the hangover is still sort of here. The new PM knows nothing about what's going on. She thinks she's cool and hard and not to be fooled - the new Thatcher. But she is most obviously not. On the contrary: the more she says or does, the more it is obvious that she has no f. clue. And the more the sterling falls, making me poorer and poorer! Grrrr. :(

The whole situation in just sort of b/s. Last funny twist was the letters: they are sending letters to EU citizens that they have one month to leave the UK, otherwise they go to jail. The Home Office claims that this is a mistake, but it just makes me nervous. If such a letter has been sent by mistake, it means that the letter exists, and can be sent.

ಠ_ಠ

Rant about the Tube!

I hate it. I can't stand the Tube, especially in the rush hour. It totally gets on my nerves. I cannot do it. I am one of these spoilt basterds who need to live close to where they work becasuse I just cannot, cannot, cannot do the Tube.

Why? Because it sucks. It sucks so much that if I were a guy, and if it sucked any harder, ... you know. ;)

More reasons:
1) signal failure
2) faulty train at station X
3) congestion.

Regarding reason 1, there's signal filure somewhere nearly every day. Funnily enough, it happens quite often near Ealing. Don't ask me why.

How do I know, even if I don't never set my foot anywhere near Ealing, or many other Tube stations? Because my company has intranet, and on the front page of the intranet, there are the WTFL updates. Quite entertaining to watch how it gets from 'minor delays' to 'severe delays' to (sometimes) 'partial closure' and then to 'severe delays' and minor delays' and finally 'good service'.

Anyway. About the signal failure - wherever it happens - how about a simple solution? Just. F***ing. Fix. It. It happens almost daily, so just fix it. Do something so it doesn't happen every day. Go for it! Don't be shy!

Regarding reason 2. I've read somewhere that this is the most common reason for delays. As in point 1, this happens all the f. time. All the time. Every day or so. So - how about doing something about that? Not sufficiently London-cool?

Regarding reason 3, this is something that p. me off royally. Like, this was the reason for the whole idea, for actually bothering to put the trains underground, build the tunnels, etc. etc. - to avoid traffic jams and congestion. So how come that the trains are stuck in congestion? Are you even f. serious?

(For those who never experienced this travesty. If you travel on certain lines in certain times of the day (typically District / Metropolitan / Circle lines around the rush hour), you randomly stop in a tunnel for 1-10 mins, between each two stops, and a voice tells you that the train is stuck in a congestion and/or we are waiting for the train in front of us to clear the platform and/or we are waiting for a green signal. Or something like that. Literally a metro traffic jam. W.T.F.)

Actually,
4) Where's the oxygen?

This tends to be worse on some lines than others. Example: Piccadilly. Just think about Piccadilly and you are dead already, just from the very thought, due to the hot, CO2-rich environment down there

5) Miscellaneous.

Have you ever heard about Waterloo and City? This is an incredible two stops line (I am serious, it only has the two termini - Waterloo and Bank - ad there's nothing between these two) which is designed only for the bankers working in the City. These people usually live in the rich, posh Western suburbs. In the morning, they arrive to Waterloo train station by the suburban trains, and then take the Tube to the City. Cosequence: while all the Tube is very diverse (people of all nationalities, races, occupations, religions, etc. etc.), W&C is almost like a Gentlemen's Club. If you don't wear a suit and a tie, and don't have your copy of The Financial Times, you are not allowed in.
The iconic sentence (printed on T shirts and postcards) is Mind the gap. I think that Signal failure or Mind the doors, mind the closing doors, mind the doors would be much more appropriate. Especially the latter is the new mind the gap: you can hear it in almost every station, pronounced by an orderly on the platform, trying to let the train move as soon as it has a red signal (so that you don't make the congestion even worse).

Which lines do I like? I don't like any Tube lines, but some p. me off less than others. For example Jubilee looks OK most of the time. Victoria works most of the time. Metropolitan is kinda all right - sometimes. But - feel free to disagree.

Strangely, I also like Bakerloo, mostly because it looks totally postapo (and I like the 'romantic' feeling about that).

And so on. The. Tube. Sucks.

End of rant.

There's one thing I wanted to share more than anything else: the reasons why I started with the weird and funny and amazing art of aikido. Because - to those who know me & who know aikido - this would seem like the most unlikely combination. Here is the explanation.

Why did I start?  Good question. I certainly did not know what I was subscribing for.

I was doing some krav maga before staring aikido. KM is very pragmatic, very goal-oriented. Some say aggressive, which is certainly also true: the 'aggressive' is there for a reason, the reason being the need to deal with an attack as quickly and as efficiently as possible. It is also fairly easy and straightforward to learn. Which is why I like it so much.

But there was only one class a week in Manchester. I was looking for something else, something to supplement my KM training. And, for some reasons (karate is too much competition, taekwondo is too much high kicks which I cannot do, boxing was banned by the husband, etc. etc.), the choice of which martial art was soon reduced to judo or aikido

I chose to give aikido a try, because it was in a more convenient location and at a more convenient time of the week. I was like, if I don't like it, I can still go for judo or whatever. However, after the first class, I was so impressed that I stayed.

Karma? Maybe.

Why did I stay? For me, this question is far more complex than ‘why did I start’. Anyone can start – in the sense that they go for one or few classes and see if they like it. My initial plan was exactly this. Go for it, see how it goes, and if it’s b/s, never show up again. And go try judo instead.

But – there’s the magic. Maybe it is ki, and maybe not. I tend to think that the magic is actually physics. Biomechanics. How your body works, how it transfers forces, how it can act as a lever and how you can fix the position of your arms and move your body so that you actually move not only your body, but also the attacker's body. And how you can really use the force the attacker gves you to do things. Whatever it is, it is fascinating.

The truth is that during my first class ever, I was deeply impressed by the magic. We did this exercise which starts with the attacker grabbing both the defender’s wrists from behind (ushiro ryote dori? Whatever…) and continues with the defender lifting their arms upwards, turning their arms in a funny way to resemble something from Karate Kid, and bending the whole body forwards. And then – then, when the defender is in this funny position, and relaxes the shoulders, nobody can move them. However, as soon as the defender tenses the shoulders and/or starts fighting the attacker's force, the magic stops working, and suddenly everybody can move the defender whenever they want.

Sounds weird when described like this. But the fact that you are in a funny bent-over position and somebody pushes and nothing happens because all the force transfers via your arms and body and legs straight to the floor - I just immediately spotted something fascinating. The magic. Possibly the underlying principle - I don't know.

Anyway, I was impressed. I was so impressed that I immediately thought that I absolutely have to learn this thing, whatever it takes. So I came again. And again. And again. And… you see.

When I moved to London, this was the first thing I searched for - a suitable dojo. Not a GP or anything like that. Even KM was second to aikido. Funny, isn't it.

So, was it karma? I am not sure. I can say only this much: 

If I started any sooner, before I did a decent amount of krav maga and before my (earlier) dragon boat career, I would most definitely consider aikido the worst, purest Asian martial art b/s ever seen.

If I started anywhere else than in my beloved Manchester dojo (which is very ki-oriented and therefore does a lot of magic-related exercises), I would probably consider aikido the worst, purest Asian martial art b/s ever seen.

But I started in Manchester, and I started at the exactly right time, and now I just feel that while this is ridiculously complex and incredibly difficult, I still have to learn the stuff anyway.

Isn't it funny? I think it is. :)

Hello again.

It's been a while. I doubt that this blog still has any readers at all, but hey.

I suppose I shall rename this blog now - now it's more like From Prague via Manchester to London. But I probably won't, at least for a while. Anyway, this is where I am now - London. I relocated at the end of April (...29 April to be more precise), and I now live on the edge of Shoreditch, the hipsta-fancy-supercool-nonmainstream part of this very interesting city.

As you can imagine, a lot has happened in the past 16 months. It's a long and complicated story of one broken heart. Plus at least one psycho. Plus some martial arts. :)

Long story short: things became bad at work. Then worse. Then much worse. Then even much, much worse. Then, insanely bad. And then I left because I have been pushed so far, and so hard, that I just couldn't cope any more. And that was it. I will spare you details. I will only make the following two comments:
1/ I never did anything wrong. I kept in line with my core values and with integrity, and I always followed what I believed in. For which I paid dearly.
2/ My heart is broken, not love-wise but work-wise. I invested incredible amount of time, energy and passion into my work, and it just did not work, and at the end it all blew up in my face, and I was left an emotional wreck.

Anyway. I started looking for work. I tried to stay in Manchester. because things. I kinda liked the city I guess. But no way, the only interview I had in Mcr did not go very well, and after seeing potential employers in London, Birmingham, London, Glasgow, London, Newcastle, London, Southampton, London, Amsterdam and Stockholm, I was left with two offers. London, or - London. I picked London.

So here I am, in a shared flat once again, living in a room which has, like, 8 sqare meters. Sharing, among others, with a cat.

Great many things happened since my last post. For example:
- Brexit referendum happened, with the f. results
- Theresa May (and her b/s) happened to us
- I started aikido (Oh yes! I! Started! Aikido!)
- we went for Christmas holidays in Malta (...you'd never guess how cool it is to go to Malta in winter!)
- Theresa May said things to EU (oh no)
- I relocated, and now I am observing a different city (which feels so different that I now believe people who say 'London is like a different country when compared to the rest of the UK')
- I lectured in Brussels (which was surprisingly good)
- my students got their exam results (aaand - some of them made it - yaaaay!)
- I realized how much better my currect company is compared to my previous company

I think that I will write about most of these things some time in the future. Or maybe not. We'll see. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

...further to my previous post, I forgot to mention one funny thing. We went to one restaurant here in Manchester which specializes in Baltic and Polish cuisine. There, we have had Kanapinis beer. It is unfiltered, and it tastes slightly 'weird'. Well, we, the Czech beer snobs, thought that maybe it's just how beer is made in Lithuania, or that the beer suffered some taste loss because it had to travel a long distance to get here.

Well, no. It is a cannabis beer. Seriously!

-----
(By the way: have I mentioned what my Lithuanian friends have told me once? They drink warm beer during winter. It appears to be not even room temperature - the beer is actually warmed before drinking! Well... I am sure I want to try this one day, but I am not so sure I will like it...)

1. We went to see Manchester International Film Festival. We've seen two blocks of short films: student films and animations.

The students films were surprisingly good; there were two best films. One of them was about an Afghani girl who was injured by an accident and then found by German soldiers, which in Afghanistan is a big problem, because while saving her life, the foreign men touched her (oh what a scandal). The other best film was about a Kyrgyz girl who is going to get married, and her favourite horse will be slaughtered for the food for the wedding. The best thing about this film is that the authors kept it surprisingly 'civil', without emotional pressure and things like that.

The animated films were... animated. Some of them funny, some of them weird, The best one was Mexican 31 min film Revoltoso, which had cubist-like 'puppets' and was visually really impressive.

2. I have finally got my new shoes! These. I looove them. My husband's money and bank account are finally paying off!

3. We have seen some anti-EU campaigners. A guy told us that 'the UK needs to leave the EU because majority of our law is made in Brussels' and that the UK should re-establish its democracy and be a sovereign nation again. This shows a very deep misunderstanding of how law is made in this country.

Then asked us what we thought and what would be our vote. 'We don't have right to vote,' we said. 'Where are you from,' he asked. So we told him. His next question was stunning: 'Is Czech Republic in EU?'

Like, seriously? Are you protesting against it or not? How can you protest against something if you have no idea about it? Oh my...

4. On Monday morning, we've spent more than 20 minutes waiting for a bus. By the time the bus arrived, I was frozen and furious.

The problem is that when a bus is this late, there are of course many people waiting for it on every bus stop. Many of these people want to buy weekly tickets, esp. on Monday morning. The more late the bus is, the longer it takes to sell all the tickets. Therefore, the more delayed the bus  becomes, which makes the next stops even more overcrowded, and then... well, you get the idea.

I've decided I would write ti (i) the city council, and (ii) our MP. She (or maybe one of her side-kicks) puts some leaflets under our door pretty much every weekend, so it is time for her to start working on improving our life!

5. My husband ordered some stuff over internet. The stuff was apparently sent by Royal Mail in a neat package which did not fit in our mail box. Therefore, we got a small card saying: Packet is in xxx. I nearly threw it away with all the spam we get every day. (We get loads and loads of takeaway restaurants menus, advertisements for kids' clothes outlets and other 'important' things.) However, I had a closer look on this particular spam, and finally noticed that it was not a spam. Therefore, I went to have a look to xxx (a pretty obvious 'secret' place where you can hide stuff and which I won't give away just in case our mail man decides to do the same thing again), and there it was, my husband's package.

Funny indeed. A mail man would never do this in the Czech Republic, because if he would, the homeless people and/or some thieves would find it and steal it straight away, no matter how well it would be hidden.

6. Everyone knows that Irish people celebrate St Patrick's day. I guess that no one (or nearly) knows that Welsh people celebrate St David's day.

To celebrate St Patrick's day, you wear green things and drink a lot (a lot). To celebrate St David's day, you carry leek and/or a daffodil. Don't ask me why.

And by the way, there is leek on one of the pound coins. (Erm, I thought it was some kind of weird agave... please don't tell Welsh people...)

(Btw2: If anyone is interested in current pound designs: http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/coin-design-and-specifications/one-pound-coin)

Ever heard of a concept called 'equitable ownership'?

OK, so this equitable ownership. In every 'normal' country, if you have stuff, you just have it. Period. Not in the UK. There is a thing called 'trust' (also an equity thing) which means that if you are a trustee, you own something, which was given to you by someone (settlor) but this guy did not quite give it to you - s/he gave you on someone else's (beneficiary's) behalf.

In other words: there was someone (settlor) who started all this. and owned a thing. He wanted someone else to have the thing. However, for some reason it is no possible that settlor gives the thing directly to that someone else. So the settlor chooses a trustee, who gets the thing instead of the someone else, and the someone else becomes beneficiary. If there is any profit in having the thing, or if the trustee sells the thing, s/he cannot keep the money, the beneficiary gets it.

It sounds fairly easy when you put it like this, but if you consider all the other problems, it becomes a mess. First thing is: legally - in common law - the true owner is the trustee. If the thing is, let's say, a piece of land, the trustee is the one recorded in the land register. However, he's at the same time not the owner, because equitable owner is the beneficiary (who is not owner in common law). So both these guys are owners, and are not owners.

Second thing: This is found nowhere in written statutes (Acts), it just happened and developed in the case law of equity courts. There is literally no written law talking about or codifying this thing. Still, it is very real. It happens every day. And because trusts and all this is equity business (...and has 'nothing to do' with common law), it takes precedence over common law, it doesn't have to be written, it just is. (And btw, have I mentioned that common law may mean three totally different things?)

I always thought that owning stuff is pretty much a binary thing - either you have it, or you don't have it. Well, in England and Wales (no idea how this works in Scotland or NI...), this has more levels than just plain 1 and 0.

It's a bit like Schrödinger ownership, if you allow me one physics students' joke.

I forgot to mention few funny little things about Edinburgh yesterday, but I cannot leave it like that!

The first thing you see when you arrive to Edinburgh Haymarket is the Scottish Gaelic name of the station: Margadh an Fheòir. This is a little warning that Scottish people are independent and will not be oppressed by the English.

Then, you learn a lot about Walter Scott. Everywhere you go, you learn the opinions of Sir Walter Scott. Anything that is shown or presented to you, there is also a small inscription about what Walter Scott thought about it.

Edinburgh Waverley - the main train station - is named after a novel. Guess who was the author! :-)

There are bagpipe players in the streets, and there are people in kilts. They have knives in their socks. They were kilts for every possible occasion. If you are male and want to dress formally in Scotland, you wear a white shirt, a jacket (a bit shorter than an ordinary suit jacket) and kilt. With formal shoes of course. If you are male and work for the castle, you wear a kilt and windstopper (and hiking shoes because there are rocks everywhere). And so on.

If you go into an ordinary shop (like Tesco or Sainsbury's), you can tell  that you are in Scotland, because they have huge shelves dedicated to Scottish stuff. Everything from milk to chocolate, from beer to meat, from potatoes to tomatoes. Everything is available in Scottish version (OK, maybe not tomatoes).

Scottish flags are everywhere and on everything. Tartan patterns as well.

Some shops offer deep fried Mars bar. I will say no more. (I have not gathered enough courage to try it, yet.)

There are few things that I really don't like about Manchester. They are listed below.

• The public transport. This topic is really complex. The following p**es me off n particular:
• The traffic jams. Solution of which is priority for no one, and certainly not for the city council.
• The absolutely ridiculous tram system. And the fact that 'expansion of the tram system' really means approx. 200 m of new track in the city (useless) and a brand new line in the Quays (where there are two lines already). I guess that about a half of the Greater Manchester area has no access to the trams and is stuck in the traffic jams instead, and this bothers no one.
• The absurd ticket system. The tram tickets work only for one line. The bus tickets work only for one operator. Well, you can have bus tickets for all operators, but that is more expensive than it should be. There is one ticket which covers both all buses and all trams, but it is very expensive.
• No night buses to our place from Sunday to Thursday. Therefore, if we ever decide to go out (to pub, theater, cinema, anything), we need to either decide not to go, or hurry back before the last day bus leaves, or use private-hire (which is not that expensive, but it is too expensive to do it often).
• The absolute inability of the bus drivers (or rather their bosses?) to wait a bit to prevent arriving in packs. What use is it if 7 buses arrive at once, and then there is 45 min wait for the next 7 buses?
• The total unpredictability of the bus arrival times. Yes, there is a schedule, but that is no more than a piece of useless paper. You just cannot rely on the schedule, which means that you are usually either really early or really late. The first case is just a terrible loss of time; the latter case can have serious consequences if you miss a train, a plane, etc.
• No trees. Or almost. In the city centre, there is some grass (not much of it!), but hardly any trees.
• No sakura trees. (If there are some, please tell me where they are.)
• No proper green spaces. There are some parks, but they are scarce, and not really accessible if you don't have a car (which we do not have).
• No cultural summary available. There is no single place where you could find interesting events. In practice, you have to check all the websites of all cultural venues if you do not want to miss something. Half the times you still miss something, mostly because some events are 'intellectuals-only', and 'ordinary' people (us) never learn about them.

I think that's the stuff which I find the worst at the moment.

There are also few things that I don't like about life in the UK which are not Manchester-specific:

• Stupid and absurd bank account rules (mentioned and explained extensively before).
• The auto-censoring everyone has to perform every day in order not to commit a hate crime.
• The idea of hate-crime, I think that you should be allowed to say what you think, even if a particular group of people finds the stuff offensive. If you say stupid nonsense or absolute bulls*t (e.g. that some people are worse than other people based only on their race or gender), you deserve condemnation and you deserve disrespect - but you should not be sent into prison for that. Sending people to prison for their opinions interferes with free speech.
• CCTV everywhere. Why?
• Silly inconsistent rules about guns and weapons. I am theoretically not allowed to have anything that could be used as a weapon. This is nonsense. Even a beer in a glass bottle can be easily used as a weapon. And, on the other hand, the bad guys don't care about such bans that much, so why am I not entitled to defend myself (in a reasonable way)?

Of course there are many positive things. I guess that half of these things only really make me angry because I am used to something better, and would leave no impression if I'd come from elsewhere. But hey, of course this is Western Europe, and I've expected everything to be better here than back home in the East!