Hello and welcome to the GB ladies final blog of our Asian tour.
It's Friday morning and I've woke up very sore and tired. 1 more session to go this afternoon. Then it's packing the bags up for one last time this trip ready for home.
We left Tokyo on Saturday to take a 2 hour flight to Seoul. All the team collected their bags and jumped on the bus. Of course there was time for some of us to grab a sneaky donut to take on our travels though.
After a two hour bus journey we made it to our hotel. We have been staying right in the Olympic Park, a legacy left over from the '88 games. It's pretty huge and you can walk round it and see the stadium and the the veledrome among other things and the "peace gates" at the entrance, quite inspiring! There are also loads of sculptures all around affording some interesting sights. When we arrived it was pretty late, so we dropped our bags off straight away and headed out for some good old proper Koren barbeque. We found a really authentic place and got given so much food! Lots of side dishes which most of us had even seen or tasted before, but to be honest there wasn't much we didn't try/like! The meat we tasted was lovely, really delicious and everyone was in good spirits.
Sunday, we all did our own thing, weather it was chilling in or around the hotel,or heading in to seoul for a bit of shopping and a look about. We all found it so much cheaper for food and shopping than TOkyo, so some of us have made some little purchases out here which is great. A bit of retail therapy...lovely!
So Monday it all kicked off again with a bang. A bus was put on for the GB team to take us ti Yong Yin University, which was about a 50 min journey.
We had to trek up a pretty steep hill to get to the uni which was hard work and was only going to get harder as the week went on. And I can tell you now,it's defiantly did!
Yong Yin uni is the biggest and strongest uni for judo in the whole of Korea. Most of the top team train there so we knew we were going to be in for a hard, final week, and that we'd all have to dig in. The number 1 Korean women team were in Japan, but this didn't effect how hard or how beneficial the training was for the women at all.
The session was started off with a bow, a stretch, and a couple of forward rolls,a little uchikomi and straight into 12x6min tachiwaza. No messing about in Korea! The session was completed in 2hours. But it was 2 hours of none stop fighting...perfect! :) this is what it was like for the rest of the sessions, usually with 5 newaza randoris to finish.
Blood, sweat and tears! It was all happening on the mat! But I think I talk on behalf of everyone when I say this but it has been a really great 4 weeks of randori, and we have all come away from this Asian tour with things we have improved, things that still need working on and some different ideas to take back home with us. The whole experience has been brilliant. And a great block of training for our European preparation.
We're all off out tonight for a team meal to celebrate Euan's birthday. (He doesn't know so shhhhh....) Were going to a steak house. Think everyone is going to enjoy it. It's really tasty!
Well that wraps the Asian trip up. I hope you have enjoyed keeping upto date with our blogs, and have got a little insight of what has been going on in the GB camp...untill next time, bye for now :-)
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