Almost exactly a month ago, at the beginning of October i travelled to portland, oregon with
my tae kwon do school for a week of intense training with
Grandmaster Kwon, Jae-Hwa. Master Kwon, although he lives in the US, often does seminars in Germany but they are often either for heads of schools or groups of a hundred or more.
I hadn't intended to travel to North America this year let alone to the United States, where I haven't been since before 2001, but when our school was invited to Portland I eventually decided that this was an opportunity that is unlikely to repeat itself. We kept an eye out for good travel deals and found one with the result that many more of us came along as otherwise would have been possible.
In the end, eleven of us went: Claudia -our instructor, Maria - Claudia's daughter and assistant instructor, Anke, Jürgen, Andrea, Jan, Fabian, Ruprecht, Lukas and Paul.
Master Kwon also invited Stefan from Cologne who is doing a semester abroad in California and members of a fledgling school in Denver to train with us. Master Kwon's dojang (or training hall) in Portland, Oregon is a converted garage stuffed with the memorabilia of a life time.
We did roughly four hours of tae kwon do a day, usually divided into two two hour sessions, for a week. Master Kwon has been living and teaching tae kwon do for a long time and knows how to get your best effort out of you all the time. By the second or third day we were already exhausted.
Mostly during our free time we wanted to nap but we did manage to get out and see a bit of Portland and Oregon. A highlight included training at 5am for two hours, driving to the Oregon Coast, stopping for a huge pancake breakfast at
Camp 18, a restaurant and logging museum, along the way, checking out some beaches along the coast and making it back to Portland around 5pm for another two hours of class. And then we went out to dinner.
After I got back home, despite the physical exhaustion and having a cold, I got a couple of compliments saying how rested I looked.
