Tournament tomorrow

I've been somewhat nervous about the upcoming tournament in Oulu, so I've not written much this past week. I've played a couple of pretty interesting games, and also a couple of very embarrassing ones. I think I will leave it to those who are interested to try and check them out theirselves. This time.

Now, I will use this space just for talking.


The trip to Oulu

I recall I already wrote that the trip from where I live to Oulu is going to be over 500 km. But I decided to add a map here for those of you who love maps. ;) So basically it's almost a 7 hour trip one way by car:

View Larger Map

And I will be taking the bus. I must first wake up tomorrow morning at 1:30, take a shower, eat something and then take a walk some three kilometers to the bus station and take the 3:15 bus to Oulu. I'll be arriving Oulu at 10:55. So it's about 8 hours sitting in a bus. I guess that'll be somewhat boring. I hope I can pass the time somehow. :)

Anxiety

My stomach has been acting up, butterflies. I didn't really know I could get so anxious about something, but looks as if it is possible, after all this is the very first real-world face-to-face tournament I'm going to, not just some pixels on the screen and a faint notion that there's someone on the other side of the earth playing against me. (That's titillating too I guess.)

There was a party yesterday evening, where all the people in this building I live in were invited to have a barbeque on the yard. So being there with my neighbors, having a cool can of beer and eating sausages, easing a little tension I told them I could show them Go and how it's played, if there were people interested. And surely I found some of them were. So I laid down the foundations for a future get-together with teaching gobans included. But as we continued on towards the night, to easing up my anxiety I might have taken one two many of them appetizers (beer mostly) and got a bit drunk. So after I got home, I played a game of Drunken Go... I would say it was interesting, if it weren't so damn embarrassing. So I'm not going into any details, except that I messed up at the end count. It was pretty awful, I don't think I'm ever going to play "under influence" again.

So hopefully the anxiety will ease up before the tournament starts. :)


Something positive

It is a cool thing, that whenever I tell people about my ambitions and ideas about setting up and founding a go salon or café, they are mostly positive about it, and if they work in the field (cafés and restaurants) they genuinely offer to help me with it. An offer which I still have to politely decline to, but I will keep in mind who have been kind enough to do so, if and when I do need help with the project. But now it seems a bit too distant, since the latest course applications (for building up any qualifications for having a café of my own) I sent came back negative. But I will try sending them out again, and again, until I succeed.

Thanks for the attention. I will now start practicing some tsumego in preparation for the games this weekend. See ya! ^^ /gg