Vo Vietnam

I was in my first Vo-Vietnam lesson the other day...

Hold on. Why, the gentle reader may ask himself, does he always write 'the other day', and never yesterday, on Monday, etc.? The answer to that is that I am tricky, lazy and an inconsistent writer. My stated goal for this blog is to post once per day, every day. However, I am often too lazy to write something in the morning (or in the evening), either because I have not yet had my 4th cup of coffee, or my 3rd cup of tea (first coffee, then tea), or because the day was too strenuous, or too boring, or... And if I do sit down to write I cannot think of anything that would hold anybodies interest any amount of time anyway.

So what I do is if and when the muse strikes me, I tap out four or five blarticles, and save them in Blog/unused. And to insidiously hide this truth from you, I say, 'the other day' and not 16th of march, so that when you read this blarticle you will not immediately think "old news" and flee. This strategy is of course rendered ad absurdum, 'cause I have spilled the beans, but sic transit gloria mundi. (You have to imagine the barefooted monk - if you want, you can also burn a piece of flax for extra credit.)

To return to the other day, I was in my first Vo-Vietnam lesson from 1215h to 1345h. When I first saw that you could learn Vo-Vietnam in Lausanne, I was tickled pink over it. I am somewhat interested in Martial Arts, and did some Tae Kwon Do a couple of years back, some Judo even farther back, and some indifferent Hapkido and a smattering of Kung Fu in between then and now. And I had never even heard of Vo-Vietnam. So I went there (marvelous sport system here at the EPFL, you pay 50 CHF -gratuit pour les etudiants - and then you can visit as many courses as you want and have time for) and had a look. And the moves are really, really different from anything I have done so far. Also, I am horribly out of shape, fat, lazy, unsupple as a stick (a really old, rotten one), and to add insult to injury I seem to have lost what little coordinated I had. But it is a really awesome course, and I will be there twice a week, and I just might inscribe at the school proper, to go one evening per week as well.

So what is Vo Vietnam? Well, actually the name of the school, and of the style, is Ecole Son Long Quyen Thuat, with a couple of scratch marks and dots over the vowels, which I cannot render here. But because of PR it is called Vo-Vietnam, which means 'Jumping Grasshoppers of Korea'.

Kidding, kidding. Vo-Vietnam means the Art of War of Vietnam, and at higher levels there's also sticks, lances, swords and stuff. There is also an appropriately old founder (94 I believe) and a logo with a dragon, everything the prospective martial arts student needs.