Dear Hanshi
Dear Shihan
Dear instructors and country representatives
First of all I’d like to wish you all I healthy and joyful 2022, filled with happiness and a lot of Goju-Kai karatedo training. Who could predict we would still live in a world where every couple of weeks a new variant of the covid-19 virus is spreading among us? Luckily the vaccination strategies implemented by the different countries are bringing us slowly back to a more or less ‘normal’ situation. 2 months ago, Gerd Shihan was able to organise a successful seminar for sandan and above in Hungary. We all felt like coming home again, enjoying training together after 2 years! Although Saiko Shihan was still not able to travel to Europe, he was virtually with us, and we could enjoy his wonderful teachings thanks to modern Internet technology. Watching Saiko Shihan and his son Gohei shihan live on a big screen even gave us the feeling we were guests at the honbu dojo in Japan.
I’m sure every member of our European Gojukai is looking forward to meet again and train together at the next European Seminar in Belgium that will take place on 18-23 July 2022. During the Instructor Seminar in Hungary I provided the new information about this upcoming event, and some of you also had the chance to take a new version of the information brochure with them. Hopefully everyone is able to teach their students again in the dojo on a regular base. That makes it time again to promote our European Seminar!
We still have some participants groups who didn’t cancel their reservations from 2 years ago and I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude for this. This unconditional loyalty to our organisation is giving us the security we need to guarantee we can proceed, despite all the setbacks we had since the covid-19 pandemic started.
Therefore we decided to allow them to review their participants list first, before we’ll open up the official room reservations for everyone again using our website http://www.ikga-gasshuku.eu/ .
Meanwhile everyone can promote the event to their students and gather their new participants information listing. Please find the new information brochure attached to this message (PDF file). If your country still has a participants listing that did not cancel it is attached too (Excel file). Please take note: after 2 years we couldn’t hold the previous price calculations and we needed to increase the costs with approx. 20 EUR for each.
For those groups that have a participants listing attached to this message, please let me know as soon as possible (but always before 14 February 2022):
Please send your new listing back to me in Excel (before 14 February 2022) so we can arrange the changes to be reflected in the reservation module on the website (preventing other groups to take the rooms you’d like to have reserved).
Although the information brochure attached still mentions the previous deadline for prepayment (31 January), we allow prepayments to be done until 28 February 2022. Even if you don’t have all the details for your participants by then, please at least secure their place by doing the prepayment in time. This will also make it possible for us to fulfill our obligations towards the venue.
If some things are still unclear, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Best Regards,
Joachim Van Opstal