February 15
After a late night and 3 hours of sleep, it was time for the first day of training. Since Master Nam was one of my roommates (Jim the other), he wanted to make sure we always had plenty of time to spare and be ready. As a side note, I believe the more Master instructors on a trip the earlier you will always be because they each want to shave off another 10 minutes from what the previous Master said.
Which was good because we were never late and no-one got left behind (which has happened!!). So at 4am we awoke, got dressed and got ready to be downstairs in the lobby at 5:30.
So we started jogging to Olympic park (across the street) and met up with GM Yun there. He was already out running for probably like an hour before us. Went to our "spot" which we came to know every morning and did some warming up etc. Master Ed & Jim worked on Hapkido while Ms. Nancy kept a close eye. GM Yun took the rest of us running. So jogging we went for about half a mile. We come to a big hill and I'm thinking, "we have to run up this thing?". Well we didn't, we got to walk up it. Whew! Oh wait, what? With someone on our back?!? So this is what the itinerary meant when it said "Hellish Training" every morning! Luckily I had Jim who's about 50 lbs lighter than me. I felt bad for him though. He had to cart me up each time! But he got stronger and stronger each time, so I guess I should be glad that I helped him train hard (hahaha). Lots more running to go...
A neat thing we saw is that pretty much everyone in the park is at least 50+ years old. Granted we were there on week days, but still...Anyways, these locals were playing badminton, rollerblading around on their semi-pro skates and biking. They were all glad to see us. The older generations appear to enjoy Americans and they were always happy and smiling as we greeted each other while we passed.
It's about 8am now and we head back to the hotel for some breakfast. We received the "American" breakfast which consisted of scrambled eggs, partially cooked bacon, french fries, toast, slice of orange, slice of tomato, OJ and coffee. All you can eat on all of it. GM Yun made sure we were eating. If you weren't eating, he'd ask why you weren't, and it really didn't matter what you'd say, he'd tell you to eat more. We learned to eat lots of toast! I'm sure our table of 6 guys easily went through an entire loaf or 2 of bread daily. Even if you ate all your food and all the toast was gone, you still were not out of the woods. He'd tell you to go back to the kitchen and ask for more toast, so we did. It was good to see he was looking out and making sure everyone was eating and being taken well care of. After breakfast we went to our rooms for 1 hour to shower and call home.
We headed off to the Kukkiwon museum where we got to see historical items of TKD through the years of it's development. Next we headed off to Seoul Tower but it was so foggy out we didn't go up because well, there wouldn't be anything to see. So we hung outside in front of it and walked around and then headed to the Chang Moo Kwan headquarters and met Great GM Soon Bae Kim. It was weird seeing that it seemed like an old musty "abandoned" building. We could hear a couple people training but couldn't see them. GGM Soon Bae Kim does not speak English so we didn't talk too much to him, but GM Yun translated everything they were saying. After that we went to dinner with him and had beef kalbi which i thought was much better than last night's pork kalbi. We finished with desert of Korean pear (which was like our pears sweetness mixed with texture of an apple) and a peach (umm..I think it was a normal peach). Seeing Mr Nick and Mr Zach didn't use the bathroom before we left, they found themselves in a little situation. Yes, we were stuck in traffic and they had to pee....bad! Finally, they couldn't hold it anymore and begged to pull over. GM Yun had the van pulled over on the highway and they jumped out and walked down the embankment and relieved themselves. GM Yun coined them "Highway Pee Pee". Needless to say, they were first to use the bathroom from there on out.
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