Topic: passionate beginner from Australia
Hello everyone,
my realname is Roy, I am 34 years old, I was born and grew up in Germany, but later when I married an Aussi girl, I immigrated to Australia. I am passionate about Cats, my Hyundai Accent and most recently Korean Traditional Archery and Korea itself.
16 years ago in Germany, when I was in my teens I developed an interest in archery and it was pure coincidence, but my first bow was a Traditional Korean Bow from Samick. I greatly enjoyed shooting that bow, but had no idea about the Korean martial art of gukgung. 8 and a half years ago I immigrated to Australia and took that bow with me, but it was stolen shortly after my arrival. A month ago I finally decided to get back into archery and tried to purchase again a Korean Traditional Bow. It was very difficult to find one here in Australia, but I finally found an archery store that had one in stock and it arrived last week.
I am an absolute beginner and as my first practice rounds have shown me, I need to learn things from the basic level up. I am fascinated by gukgung to the level that I now started to save up money to go next year April to Korea and attend for one week Coach Kim Archery School in Goesan to properly learn at least the basics of Korean Traditional Archery. But until then I do hope to educate myself to some degree via the internet and books if I can find any.
I sadly don't have any Korean friends and it seems that gukgung jungs (Clubs) are non existent in Australia let alone anywhere near where I live. And I also can't speak or read Korean, oh though I might start looking into learning some in the near future. But thankfully I found this forum which seems to be full of information about Korean Traditional Archery.
I also seen in some youtube videos that there is a book by Thomas Duvernay that would be a perfect starting point for me, but I haven't been able to find where I could get it from. Maybe someone here knows where to get it from (physical or as an ebook).
The other thing I struggle with is finding a thumb ring and other Korean Traditional Archery equipment like the bow-cover and so on. Maybe someone knows any Korean based archery shops that would supply internationally their goods and that either have an english webpage/onlineshop or someone that speaks english and that I could simply phone in regard to ordering items.
Hopefully I can learn from this forum and its users' personal experiences some to get myself started.
~Felidae