2015-05-04: Choose your enemies wisely

Ewa decided her leg is not a valid reason to avoid the kind of beating I got yesterday so she joined in on the chaos of training with the kiddies instead of just with the senior sensei.

Lady Ewa of Tarth... So long as I am not The Hound (spoiler alert, she kills him)

One of the fun things about training with the senior guys is that when you do something half right it works. This is not the case with people who are not as skilled. Basically they are surprised at your outlandish behaviour and don't know what to do. This results in interesting bruises.

Doesn't even look that different

We supported a Karate based charity a whiles back which gave us T Shirts that said "Ask Me About My Bruises" it was kind of funny.

Except we both need to grow mustaches

When a persons heart rate is above something like 150 they stop generating accurate short term memory. The issue we have currently is that whilst we know we have bruises and can point at them we have no recollection how they occurred. We need to relax more in shiai. That way we will know where the bruises came from and have boring stories to tell.

In general I think the Japanese were somewhat surprised by the competitive streak in My Lady

In shiai I got a point. An actual one. Yesterday I pushed a tiny kid out and he got a half point penalty but this time I actually scored a real point which the judges gave to me. This made me happy.
To score a point (as with the other dresses with sticks activities) you have to hit the correct bit of the other guy with the correct bit of stick with good posture while screaming the name of the bit you hit. Kind of like naming your shots in pool; it shows you meant it.

The Sensei in the background is wondering when he will have to step in and save his student. Probably when the fight goes to the ground.

Ewa has always had problems with the screaming bit, it is much harder than you would think. Jukendo seems to be improving that. Probably because Sensei is always telling her to get angry with me and channel the rage.

Food & Beverage Review: Fujichiban

http://www.fujiichiban.jp/index.html

mapref

We are hungry hungry little hippos. We need vast quantities of foodstuffs. Ramen is a good way of getting vast quantities of food without having to think much (plus super cheap usually). Fujiichiban is a chain with a turtle mascot and in our state of minds turtles are friends to hippos.

$8 for more soup than you can believe you can eat.

Technically it is a noodle soup. But they have a great one which is a Japanese curry soup with meat strips in it and crumbed fried pork floating on top. There are noodles in there but they are really quite secondary when we are food monsters. Oh and there are technically vegetables in it too, mostly spring onions.

Even if it is fast it is too slow at the moment so we grabbed some fried prawn to stop us from devouring other patrons.

The bowls are almost big enough to put your head in. This is dangerous for us at the moment as we are quite capable of falling asleep without noticing. Drowning in ramen is probably reserved for special people and we aren't that special.

When you get a big spoon you know you are getting a big soup

Ewa had a miso soup with slices of pork because even when a hungry hungry hippo she is still a Lady. I had to help her finish the noodles. I am a Thoughtful (and Sweaty) Man.

We cannot do the 3 or 4 minute "slurp back a bowl of ramen" you see guys doing at the train station but at least we finish it

Rating: 8/10 (I hate to use the cliched Portions Are Huge rather than say the food was tasty but in this case the portions were huge. And Tasty)

Lady Biceps

At the end of the evening we tallied up bruises. I have two days of bruises while Ewa has one but I think she still won if you score by the Less Bruises Means You Are Better scale. She seems to think that this is the best scale to use.

Probably I should claim to have forgotten to tense my biceps.

I lobbied hard for the More Bruises Means You Fought Harder scale but several logical points were raised which even I had to admit probably made my scoring system invalid.