Articles about and around Here & Now

Workshops with Grandmaster William C. C. Chen

Between 2012 and 2018 I attendend some 10 workshops with Grandmaster William C. C. Chen. Most of them where in Germany, some in the Netherlands. There is quite a close connection between Tai Chi Chuan Bremen e.V, Tai Chi Studio in Hannover, Inner Touch in Zwolle, NL, The Studio School of T’ai Chi Ch’uan in Deventer, NL, and Ceciel Kroes in Amsterdam. At each workshop I met people from the other schools. When you look closely, you might see the same people in the group photos.

Country life in Bo Thai

Bo Thai is a small town on the edge of a wide plain. HERE & NOW is about 3 km from the village and is located on the slopes of the Phetchabun mountains, a mountain range up to 1800m high, which stretches about 200 km from north to south. From here you have a good view over the plain where mainly rice, corn and tobacco are grown. If not weddings, funerals, house initiations with the monks, “cut hair” (big party, if the novices are given a bald head), which is quite common, it is relatively quiet here.

Harvest time

You find a lot of rice paddies around here. The Farmers also cultivate sweetcorn, as you can see. After the sweetcorn they usually sow small beans. It seems that there is no more tobacco planted and there is now more sugarcane in this area.

Som Tam competition

A big event are also the Som Tam competitions. Som Tam is a papaya salad that is usually very spicy. In the Isan, sometimes a crayfish, tiny dried crabs and blah (I call it “rotten fish”) are added and in a certain composition it is one of my favorite foods (without the mentioned ingredients).

In these competitions teams of three compete against each other. One teammate prepares the papaya salad, the other two perform one, you could say, ambiguous dance, all this is associated with a lot of laughter and fun, nobody really takes that seriously. In the video the music starts at 4:00, at 5:30 it gets a bit more lively and at 7:30 it´s getting crazy.