On Saturday I was in Ballina, Ireland, and a bit nervous: there was a Haedong Kumdo seminar in town, and I was scheduled to test for black belt. Behind this was years of different sword arts, like viking swordfighting, Iaido, Kendo, sabre fencing, and two years of quite intense Haedong Kumdo practice. We tested together with two Swedes who already...

Looks like 2008 is forming up to be a quite busy conference year, at least looking at my Dopplr page. Here are the events I'm speaking (or performing as is the case with Haedong Kumdo) in this fall: Aug 2nd: Haedong Kumdo Seminar in Mayo, Ireland: part of the Finnish team Aug 9th - 10th: aKademy in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium: Location-aware...

Grand Master Kim Jeong Seong of the United World Haedong Kumdo Federation visited Helsinki last weekend to hold a seminar on Korean traditional swordmanship. The weekend was a very interesting combination of various sword forms, two sword sparring and cutting and control exercises. We also held examinations for various belt levels, where I attained 1st keub (red-black). Our instructors Jose...

My holiday motorcycle trip of this summer was an interesting one, in the Chinese sense. The plan was to first ride to Switzerland to attend the first Haidong Gumdo European Championships, and then continue from there together with Juha to Montenegro. As it happens, Juha never got his motorcycle working, and my trip was filled with various adventures and misfortune,...

I’m selling my old bogu (kendo armor) on Huuto.net:

European Haidong Gumdo association is arranging the first European championships of Haidong Gumdo in Zürich, Switzerland on June 15th - 17th.

We went with Kerttu to a fencing lesson for the first time yesterday. The sabre course feels interesting, and the connections to Kendo, the other sword sport I’ve practiced are definitely visible.