I went to a dojo in town today to get back in the swing of martial arts. Finding these places is really difficult, primarily because I don't read Swedish but also because the numerous flyers I see don't tell you where their dojo is. Anyway, since I originally started with aikido, and later transfered to jujitsu due to aikido's relative unpopularity within Ko Sho, I figured that this would be a good opportunity to go back to my roots. Unfortunately this aikido was a bit too...soft for my taste. It turns out that they don't ever actually want to inflict any amount of physical discomfort on the students, so the techniques are watered down. "Pure" aikido some might call it.
One technique involved pushing the uke's arms back while stepping to their missing leg, this got them off balance but not enough to make them fall, so I kied through. My partner was not pleased by this saying I didn't need to push, how aikido is about not using your own energy and then demonstrated that she could push if she wanted to, in a "How do you like it when I do it to you?" tone (in the process doing the technique more effectively than she had done previously). The same person was correcting my footwork and showed me that the left leg goes directly behind the leg of the uke right before they fall over. "Ah, so you could trip them too." I mused, and she seemed surprised that I would have thought of such a dreadful thing.
Other people I was partnered with seemed confused as to why I was not going down when they tried to take my balance, not in the sense that they didn't know why their technique wasn't working on me, but why I wasn't falling over for them. Maybe I read too much into their expressions, but that's how it seemed, at least.
Another technique that we practiced bore a striking resemblance to a technique I learned back at Ko Sho. The major difference was that at the end they just hold the arm without any joint locks or anything. I *gently* applied pressure to my partner's elbow until he tapped, as would be expected. I didn't know he was bothered by this until he told me, "Where did you learn to learn to do that lock? That's dangerous! You could easily break someone's elbow!"
Fancy that, I could concievably hurt someone with an aikido technique!

Now granted I have gotten accustomed to the rough and tumble nature of the Ko Sho system, especially with the incorporation of karate, jujitsu and who knows how many other myriad martial arts into our aikido program, but I figure no pain no gain is an established fact of learning any martial art. I'm beginning to see why the head instructor back home had such a poor opinion of aikido.

There were some good points to the class though: since the every non black belt wears a white belt it makes practicing with them unpredictable since I have no way of knowing their skill level. Also, I learned an interesting variation on that technique that I recognized from the dojo back home. I'll go back there a few more times and see if it improves, if not I'll shop around for another dojo that's more my taste.

And to end on a high note, martial arts humor!