California love, The Cheesecake Factory and first training session.

So I finally arrived in San Jose together with my good friend and training partner Anders. We had a pretty good but also very long (24 hours) and uncomfortable trip that saw us stopping over in Amsterdam and Seattle before landing in San Jose International Airport. After arriving, the first thing we did was to go get our rental car which is a pretty awesome Ford Fusion with all the equipment you can imagine, and to use Rener Gracie's expression, DAAANG, the car drives like a dream... I can't wait to hit the streets of California in this baby that's for sure! Here's a picture :-)

After settling down in the hotel and getting some decent food, although the food we got in the plane was surprisingly good, we decided to go visit Samir Chantre's academy which is located 5 minutes from our hotel. After meeting Samir I can say that he's comes of as an extremely cool guy and I'm looking forward to get the chance to train with him.

Samir invited us to go eat with him, Caio Terra and their good friend Vitor, who is a brown belt and also trains at Caio's academy. We went to The Cheesecake Factory which is an absolutely awesome and yet disgusting place all together. Whatever you order you can be sure is like 50% cheese.

I ordered a Chicken menu with mashed potatoes which was actually some chicken with a huge peace of melted cheese on top and the mashed potatoes must have been 50/50 with potatoes and cheese...  I have a small battle inside if this was actually disgusting or extremely awesome :-) I do like cheese but it can get too much. And another thing, the plate servings was HUGE! My stomach was feeling really bad afterwards. That said it was cool to meet Samir, Caio and Vitor whom Anders and I will be training with for the next 8-10 days.

Anyways, after The Cheesecake Factory we decided to just go back to our hotel and sleep as it was getting late and we had been travelling for 24 hours and I dont think I had a decent rest for well over 30 hours.

Here's a picture from The Cheesecake Factory. I apologize for the bad quality :-) Later on Caio's son and girlfriend and her sister joined us. Was a good ending to a long day!

After a not so good night of sleep we woke up Thursday morning feeling the jet lag and difference in time zones, meaning we did not get much sleep :-)

We decided to hit the streets of San Jose to check out the area and visit some different shopping malls. We went to Target which is a HUGE super market with everything you can imagine and after that we went to BEST BUY which is a electronics store. I really want to buy a video camera here but it's not really as cheap as I had hoped and the selection at BEST BUY was not what I had hoped. Basically the same as in Denmark. 

After checking out San Jose for a while we went to the first training session of our trip at Caio Terra's academy, Institute of Martial Arts, which was lead by one his friends/training partners, a black belt called Flavio. A super cool guy that I got the chance to roll with at the end of the class. Unfortunately I somehow busted my chin so it started bleeding pretty bad so I had to sit out for some of the class :( very bad luck. As this was our first training session we spend a lot of time shaking hands and talking to the students and they are definitely a really cool and down to earth group of guys and girls, they are all super friendly and really this is just the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu mentality. It doesnt matter where in the world you decide to train, Jiu-Jitsu is an international language that if you speak it and you have a humble and ego-less approach, you will basically fit in in' any academy in the world and it was the same at Caio's Academy. It was just an awesome feeling finally putting on the gi and training :-)

After the training it was just straight home to relax and going to bed early as we/I still feel the jetlag and difference in time zones.

I will try to get some pictures from the academy today (friday 20th) with some of the guys. Caio will be away on seminar for the weekend and won't be back before Monday. 

We also decided to check out downtown San Jose today and tomorrow (Saturday) we will drive to San Francisco and see what that is all about!

Before I close this blog post I just want to say thanks for taking the time to read my blog, i hope you enjoy it! Feedback is more than welcome in the comments section. Any feedback is appreciated, good or bad!

You can also follow me on twitter @MMPBJJ or youtube where I will be posting videos. My username is MMPBJJ :-)

Michael