Toes Conditioning

In karate, almost every part of your body is important. If you rigorously train a part of your body, it might developed into an effective weapon. It’s including your toes!! In our Goju-Ryu style(IOGKF), the toes are very important for your stances, specially for sanchin stance. In sanchin stance, the whole body must be connected to the ground, and the precursor to this is the toes. The toes must grip the ground so the foot can function like a suction to provide stability and connectivity to the whole body.

This small detail is very often forgotten which results bad rooting in stances. But very often small details actually helps to advance further in training. Conditioning the toes is very important since gripping using your toes is not a natural thing for human. Exercises like warming up the toes before training, scaling the dojo floor using your toes, using tetsu-geta(iron clog) helps a lot.

By conditioning, the gripping ability, flexibility, strength and stamina of the toes increased. From here, it provides the basic for the further advancement, utilizing the conditioned toes to be an offensive weapon. Nowadays the practice of kicking in modern karate using toe-kicks has been replaced by kicking using the ball of the foot for safety reason and the ease of use. Some styles still preserved this technique, but the majority of practitioner aren’t practicing it anymore or do not even aware that this technique exist.

In my opinion, toe kick is one of the most effective kick technique. Bare-footed, if the toes are conditioned, kicks can be delivered to the floating ribs, back of the knee or groin. With shoes on, it is very effective to areas such as shin bone, knee cap, and groin. It is very snappy, and the target area is low, so it is not difficult to execute it. For me, it is an efficient technique and definitely worth the sweat!

Hong Bak vs Bak Pao

Yeahhhhh!!!! It’s hong bak aka babi hong part deux and bakpao this time!!! During chinese new year holiday I cooked babi hong again for the second time and also tried myself for the first time at baking. The second babi hong is obviously far better compared to the first one, since I tried to follow the full recipe at Cikcik’s. Last time I replaced the red wine with white wine since I didn’t have red wine at that time and also some other ingredients. This time I followed 99.99%, although it did taste better, but I think the next time I try it again, I will definitely reduce the dried shrimp and dried squid usage since it tasted a little bit on the salty side.

The next one is bakpao, although I never feel comfortable with baking, but due to the long holiday, I decided to try making bakpao. For this one I really measure all the ingredients properly since I don’t want to make a mess and lost my interest to baking just because my virgin experience is not good. The result is definitely worth the sweat!! Thank you very much for Cikcik’s great recipes, it really has a lot of interesting recipes that makes me motivated to actually do it! I will try to make my own babi panggang(roasted pork) for the next easter holiday, just wait for it!!!

Love and Hate

We, Indonesian, tend to complain about almost all things. From the government, the corrupt practices, the polluted city, the traffic jam, this and that, basically we can complain about anything Well, try to be an expatriate and you will find something different. As much as the life here in Singapore is much better in terms of security, orderliness, convenience and some other things, but for me I still plan to return to my homeland one day to spend the rest of my life.

It’s funny that during my school days, me and my classmates don’t really like to do “upacara bendera”… uhhmm… what’s the term for it in English? Well, basically we do it every Monday mornings and every national days. It is to commemorate our national heroes and the founding father. It’s purpose is to give us the sense of nationality and belonging to our country, but when you do it every Monday morning, specially for students, it is definitely something that not everyone might enjoy. So, where’s the funny part? As much as I hate those ceremonies, after I came to Singapore, sometimes I can hum some of our national songs. I guess when you’re far away, you will realize how you miss something/someone, but when you’re near them, you can’t really appreciate the feeling.

For Indonesian expats, enjoy this song!  Many thanks to Widibrata2 for putting it up in youtube!

Lo! Cometh the Flood!!

New governor, new year, same old flooding. Although I am now living in Singapore, working to get a living, but I was born in Jakarta, raised in Jakarta and experienced flooding in Jakarta. The condition has changed from bad to worse. Before 2001, the big flood only say hello every 5 years, but after that, it gradually worsen. The interval changed to three years, two years, one year and now almost every more-than-four-hours-heavy-rain!!! What has the new governor do? All those “Jakarta Untuk Semua”(Jakarta for all) has really been fulfilled in a negative way, and where is he now? I haven’t see or hear him in the news at all. At least his predecessor, still showed his face although he never admit his mistake in handling the flood issue, but instead pointing to heaven which he blame for all the misery of Jakartans. It’s not only flooding, but also the corrupted busway project has becoming a joke, bad services, late arrivals, always full when it arrives. What about traffic? Well, he come out with an idea to shift the working schedule of the civil servants earlier to 6am if I’m not wrong, and he recommend non-civil servants to reschedule their office hour to start from 9am. This kind of ideas, along with 3-in-1 rule is a stupid ideas that are not looking into the problem itself, but instead avoiding the problem. It’s not solving anything but making it worse. Well, the list is still long, but we can only open our arms widely to welcome the flood, although with a long frustrated sighing…