Got back yesterday night from a week of training with PM in Prague. Was absolutely a brilliant time in many ways.
PM's gwoon is situated near the heart of Prague, a beautiful city that needs far more time to explore then the single day I had left to see it. The core group of his students come train almost on a daily basis and work truly hard. Each training starts with stance training (sei ping ma) and other hard exercises before moving on to the topic of focus for that week (condition, forms, etc). This week the focus was on conditioning which I participated in once on Monday.
Can say for sure it made me realize again how much more I need to work on the basics! Really have to work on stance, stamina and strengthening exercises. I've been given enough pointers and tips, so no excuses possible
PM gave me 2 classes during the day where we put the focus on Gung Gee Fook Fu Kuen, especially on the structure ("bend the wrist, as hard as you can"). Again, I've been given his insights very generously and I'll have a long time before me to work these into my system.
In the true atmosphere of the forum the goal was not to learn his way and only accept that as the true way, but to see how his approach is, and why, and benefit from that in the way I perform the form in the Chiu family tradition.
During lunch PM took me to a mix of different places ranging from vegetarian Vietnamese to Thai Fastfood, Czech and of course the mandatory Chinese restaurants. During one of the lunches he introduced me to Sun Wukong as well!
Friday evening, party time
PM has been inviting students all week to join, and with a group of 5 we started the evening at a Chinese restaurant (lovely to see how all Chinese restaurants had the Olympics on TV) We first went to a music bar which reminds me very much of the place I used to go to in my city, and where I met my gf. Apparently revival bands are very popular there and tonight a U2 revival band played. They played brilliantly and Sunday Bloody Sunday after the break really got us going jumping till the end of their performance. We ended the evening at Roxy's, a popular club and the place to go if you're into dance music.
To sum up, a great week and I'm thoroughly tired. Both from practice as the amount of information I got and have to process over the coming period. I hope I have the capabilities to do so and make sure PM's time he took for me was spent well!
Just a few pics I took while being in Prague:
