New Friends ... no, not on facebook.

It's great to be back into the rhythms of a normal training week. I had my first night back at my school last night, and enjoyed it immensely. Two visitors arrived from the UK for training (Mark and Roger from Fighting Fit Martial Arts in the Cotswalds) and another coming from South Africa on the weekend (Marc Hebert).
I think there are a lot of benefits to be gleaned from travelling abroad for training; the distractions of daily life are cut to a minimum - there is a greater appreciation of the things learned (perhaps due to the massive effort involved in learning those things) - there are new training partners to help 'pressure test' your game - plus of course, the fact that being in a new environment helps to see things from a new perspective.
I often have guests travelling to my home town of Geelong from far away - and it is always a pleasure to have them in the class. I meet a lot of people in the work that I do and have built some rock-solid friendships over the years; perhaps one of the most rewarding things about martial arts training is the opportunities that it provides for us to connect strongly to people from different walks of life and different parts of the world - the kinds of people that perhaps, in the course of our normal lives, we would not usually get to know or befriend. Nice.
JBW