I’ve been busy lately and after a late night last Friday I had to pay the price. So now I’m sniffling a little with a head that feels heavy. The weekend was great though, because I had my first taste of acrobatics again.
If you are unable to use one side of your body it’s sometimes nice to do stuff on your knees. Especially if it’s acrobatics.
Due to my temporary mobility problem I decided to spend time re-doing the PHYSIQUE website. The new site is online and can be viewed on http://www.physique.nl/. The old site looked like this.
Finally and most importantly I decided that living all alone in the south of Nijmegen doesn’t work for me. Today I was invited to have dinner with people that wanted to see if I could join their house. It’s a group of people owning five houses and everybody who joins becomes a owner. I’d be living together with 4 other people and having a communal living room, kitchen, a shower and a bedroom by myself of about 20m2. There is a big garden. It would be nice to live close to the center without having the stress of buying a house and having the benefit of other people around me. Let’s see if I’m accepted.
When you want to do acrobatics, Nijmegen is the place to be. I’m not exagerating when I say there is no other place in the world where one can play as much as in Nijmegen.
Why is this? Because the Netherlands had two circus acrobats called Rijk Hoedt en Cor van Velthoven. They were the Como brothers. Back in the 80’s they standardised acrobatics and started teaching it, because there was a demand for different styles of cabaret. Lowest level being beginners or A level going up to E level or semi-professional. Three of the students from back then are now teaching very actively in Nijmegen, which means you can play almost every day.
In the weekends there are a lot of acrobatic conventions all around the Netherlands and Germany for enthousiasts to join.
Luckily sometimes a camera is present at my classes and wonderful pictures are taken.
So yeah, my life is rather fast paced at the moment. I’ll inform on my last two exquisite weekends and my first two days at work.
Not the last weekend, but the weekend before (26th and 17th of September) I joined 23 of my friends in a trip to a holiday park. Two days of hiking, eating, drinking, laughing, cooking, talking and doing back flips in a fairly sized swimming pool. For those of you that think you need an oven to bake pizza’s; you’re wrong. Put two bricks in a fireplace, fire it up with some wood, put the homemade pizza on a lid and presto; perfectly charred pizza.
The week after I started at my new job at Physique. Man, it’s just perfect. The vibe is great. There is a lot of experience in the field of physiotherapy and fitness. The re-integration part had been neglected for some time now and so I’m now responsible to restart that part of physique. Again fantastic colleagues with huge amounts of experience. Everybody is energetic and full of ideas. I’m only working 32 hours so that means I’m off on Fridays. Yahhh! On Tuesdays some colleagues get together to do some team workout and I decided to join them.
Last weekend I drove with three fellow acrobats to Munich for a acrobatics convention. The drive is supposed to take a little less than 7 hours. We drove more than 10 hours because of the road works. We were in a traffic jam for over one and a half hour. But the convention was worth the pain. A lot of enthousiastic people, 20 hours of rigorous training, 12 new tricks, a shitload of food, no sleep worth mentioning and heaps of muscle pain.
Not a really big update, but I need to go. Next acrobatics class coming up
My acrobatics-trainer Noël has a very cool job (click). He uses acrobatics in teambuilding sessions. This evening he’s doing a workshop for anaesthesiologists at the Radboud university. He asked me to join him during this workshop together with another student. I’m really looking forward to it.
Paulina had her birthday. I love birthdays because a lot of friends meet. I don’t like birthdays because I usually can’t find proper gift. Now was different. Paulina is a fellow acrobat. I knew she liked something to practice her handstands with. So I’m going to arrange for a handstand stand. Because I haven’t got it yet I decided to put something together. A real one will look like this except there will be more metal involved.
Friday evening until Monday afternoon non stop workshops, shows and partying. Take somewhere around 700 acrobats
a huge indoor tennis court
and you get neat tricks. Here’s a compilation of last year’s convention. Couldn’t find one of this year yet.
I was introduced by some Americans into acroyoga, which was more than a little relaxing. Not my thing to train for, because it doesn’t give me the boost I need. Yet fun nonetheless.
In the closing show we saw a French acrobatics troupe called Akoreacro. If you ever get a chance to see them; they are awesome!
I have to say that three days were a lot of fun. We have a nice group of people in Nijmegen we train with. We all bunked together in tents.
Monday evening I was so tired I went to bed at 6.00pm. I got up at 7.00am this morning.
The 29th of May until the 2nd of June there is going to be an international acrobatics festival in Bemmel (just above Nijmegen). Three days of fun outside with a lot of acrobats. Guess who’ll be there?
