Martial Arts. Who has practiced/practices them?

[Skybird]

Ten years of private training 4-5 times a week in freestyle but closest description would be Wing Tsun, and Japanese swords. Before and after those years was less privileged individual training, but always outside a club context. All in all roughly twenty years. I was extremely lucky with my teachers, my mentor in Berlin was a colleague of my father who trained me together with his son for almost ten years, he was more than just a teacher for me, and he was an real expert with swords, old Samurai tradition in his family. One of my swords I got from him, an ancient original. A bit of archery I also learned from him, and he helped me to realise where I was picking wrong paths in my zen meditations, but then always let me found my own ways, and learn from my mistakes. A marvellous teacher, and sometimes I miss him very much. I avoided sport clubs and organizations, i also never liked tournaments and sport clubs in general (I'm no club-animal, I even did not like chess clubs when I played tournament chess, I always hated the regular timetable, and the expectations of others concerning oneself needing to perform good. so i played club chess only for a limited time, then switched to correspondence chess, which was much better for me). Don't train anymore since over ten years (which unfortunately can be seen in my physical appearance ) Some people like competition atmosphere and sport championships, but I never liked such things. Training to fight is a tool to educate myself or to fight in seriousness if needed, a point scoring or a paper means nothing to me. All this did me repeatedly good service when being in the ME region.

That advise by van-Damme is a good one once weapons come into play, especially firarms. It doesn't need more than an idiot to master a pistol at short range, and that is really bad. I think today that some of my past decisions maybe werent especially clever, although I always kept our equipement or money and the others took the beating - but firearms never were involved. Except that Turkish soldier idiot who managed to almost kill me with a shot that got loose unintentionally... Freak...