Two years later, Musashi left his village, and spent some time traveling and engaging in duels. This time Musashi arrived early. Musashi arrived late a second time, and disarmed and defeated him. Seijūrō accepted, and they agreed to meet at a northern temple on 8 March 1604. Musashi arrived late, greatly irritating Seijūrō. “That’s my hometown in Northern Ontario.” I said. Sasaki Kojirō was respected and feared throughout the length and breadth of feudal Japan, and the most undeniably daunting opponent Musashi would ever face. He was known as ‘The Demon of the Western Provinces.’ Kojirō’s favored wielded weapon during combat was a three-foot blade, called the ‘laundry-drying pole.’ Despite the length and weight of his sword, Kojirō’s strikes were unusually quick and precise. He used only wooden bokken training swords in actual duels not caring which weapon his foe used, such was his mastery, and never defeated in over 60 battles.

I showed Chris, over the stove. From 1605 to 1612, Musashi travelled extensively all over Japan, on a musha shugyō warrior pilgrimage to hone his fighting skills. But his development as a rōnin transcended any single fighting style. Todaoki’s chief weapons master was Sasaki Kojirō, who went by the fighting name of Ganryū ‘Large Rock,’ after the style of the school he had founded. At the age of thirteen, he wrote his name on a challenge posted by a samurai named Arima Kehei, looking to hone his art. At this precise moment was the birth of the classical samurai niten’ichi sword-fighting style, battling with a long katana in one hand and a shorter wakizashi in the other. If a samurai’s wife gave birth to a son he could then one day become a samurai. Away from home, one comes to understand what “home” actually is and what it means. I generally like to stay close to home, but I do take a longer trip once in a while. It is disrespectful to step on the threshold of the ger while entering, and after an established series of salutatory questions, visitors are expected to tip back three glasses of arak. By the early 1900s, the price of gold and silver outstripped the worth of the coins, leading governments to cut back or eliminate these metals’ use for coinage.

You’ll see that parts of the bottom of the ski are touching the floor — essentially, large parts of the front and back of the skis, with the camber in the middle — and these areas are called contact points. England was the first nation to put steam power to the test on a large scale. To put it simply… There are still few exclusively Greek restaurants, but Birmingham-area diners can taste this blended heritage at luminaries like Alabama’s oldest restaurant, The Bright Star (opened in 1907 and now under fourth-generation family management), where fresh Gulf snapper sings with earthy oregano and zesty lemon. Theorists have struggled with stones weighing up to 2 tons to a height of a few feet. I will have to get inside a tent to talk. If you’re interested in submitting a talk or working group, please contact John Baldwin or Ed Maste. I carry hand sanitizer and use the free sanitizer when available. To escape he was forced to draw his second sword and defend himself with a sword in each hand.

This second victory outraged the Yoshioka family, whose head was now the 12-year old Matashichiro. If we have second thoughts, we listen to that gut feeling. Freezers have more insulation than fridges. If you want your staycation to feel a little more festive, then you might want to call it a holistay. If what you want to do is to keep on traveling then you are actually free to do so. “If you really knew how dirty and raggedy the Old West was, you wouldn’t want any part of it.” He said, dishing out the eggs. When Musashi was seven, his father was killed, and the boy was farmed out to two uncles at a temple in southern Honshu, who continued to train him in basic martial skills, Buddhism, and reading and writing. Miyamoto Musashi was born in 1584, to an accomplished martial artist and swordsman. Perhaps Musashi had been inspired by the two-handed movements of temple drummers, perhaps the paired jutte and sword technique of his father, perhaps the Kongen sutra about the two guardians of Buddha, or perhaps the idea of holding the twin swords up in the light to form a perfect circle of mu nothingness. Adhesive-backed strips of Velcro were perfect for securing tools and toothbrushes in zero gravity.