This year it took this long to make my first nanbudo trip abroad. My destination was the "Norwegian twin seminar", meaning Oslo and Skien seminars in early summer. Since the Oslo seminar was cut a bit short I still had the "harder" part ahead of me. Which means one week of training in Skien.

Right after the first day the amount of training was cut down a bit. Low grade adult group was a bit small, so they decided to embed it into the higher grade adult group, and doing so prolonged the training session into two full hours. So, during monday I got quite heavy set of 4,5 hours of training. For the rest of the week the training dosage was slightly more humane 3,5 hours a day.

The content of the trainings were pretty similar to the previous seminar in Oslo. We didn't train any of those "old" randories. Instead for pair technique we did a lot of Nanbu sotai _combinations. The _kata part of training consisted large variety of shihotai and nanbu katas, and during Friday we spent decent amount of time with sampo sho. We also spent kinda lot of time with fairly new juji, okuri, kubikake and tomoe nage nanbu sotai randories and kihon ju style training, which emphasizes distance, timing, focus etc. - being a bit more combat-like pair technique.

I was accommodated in the dojo with the rest of foreing visitors. There were nanbudoka from Croatia, France, Australia, Spain and Japan. There were not so many of us, but we were an interesting colourful bunch which mixed nicely with locals during the trainings. It was a great opportunity to learn from each other.

On Saturday the seminar peaked with graduation exams and dinner party, which lasted very late at least for some of us. I thank everyone involved for the whole week. And I even got to fulfill a small dream of mine - to travel via surface. My trip back home consisted a buss ride from Oslo to Stockholm and an overnight ferry from Stockholm to Turku. It took a while but at least I proved to myself that this is possible and actually less expensive than I thought previously.

Kalle Lönnroth, 2 dan