Back in the late summer of 2004 I was sitting in Kelowna in the worst gridlock of the year.
My pager had been going off for more than an hour. The latest messages told me a VIP back the way I just came from was demanding service within the hour. And then immediately. And then an hour ago.
Every client that day had been problematic.
A friend of mine had moved to South Korea to do the English teacher thing a few years prior and had been messaging me non-stop about the opportunity; a six-figure income and the adventure of moving overseas.
I emailed him when I got home that night.
We Arrived in June 2005
Unprepared.
Unprepared for culture shock.
Unprepared for reality versus expectations.
And I'd injured my hip flexor a couple of weeks prior and was barely able to fit in just enough physio that I could walk upright onto the plane.
The injury took months to heal, and that's OK, because finding a gym was an ordeal.
First off, I couldn't work the Korean internet. Because I was illiterate.
When I found someone who wanted to help, they didn't know what jiu-jitsu or MMA (격투기) was.
When we were finally on the same page they started calling around for me (as in, on the phone) and it turned out everyone taught jiu-jitsu and MMA.
Every single gym.
Every TKD club. Every hapkido club.
It wasn't true.
There was never any jiu-jitsu and the striking was all unusual. I'd stick around long enough to follow some of the other students out the door after class to ask if they knew anything about the kind of gym I was actually looking for.
Eventually I got a name: TEAM MAX in Incheon.
When I arrived at the address I found they'd moved to 일산. The current club was teaching jiu-jitsu, but there was something unusual going on. The instructor was a dentist by day, and an accomplished sambo athlete.
Also forlorn.
His business was failing.
Nobody wanted to learn sambo and his jiu-jitsu instruction was unusual. When he showed me his marketing materials he had one of the highlight knockouts from a K-1 event as the hero image for his kids program.
We discussed this as he demoed leglock after leglock on me, explaining that nobody wanted to learn them. I asked about the wisdom of using a kickboxing image for a jiu-jitsu club and especially for one developing a kids program. This went on for about 90 minutes.
On the way out one of the students gave me the name of a kickboxing gym back my way to look into, who had another student that gave me the name of the club I'd eventually wind up at, and still consider my home club, in my Korean hometown:
Bucheon Blue Dragon
There were a few more hoops to jump through.
One of my English students offered to help. She tracked down the phone number, made a call, discovered that the place was only a couple of blocks from her house and walked me over after class one evening.
We walked into an old, generic 90s-era building and down and into the basement where the head student was waiting for us. The two of them helped me with the paperwork and got me signed up.
I could barely say hello and count to ten.
But I recognized the jiu-jitsu so I kept showing up.
I did no-gi and kickboxing classes there for the first several months.
Then winter rolled in and 관장님 handed me a gi for the first time.
The club I started with in Kelowna had a little bit of contempt for the gi at the time and that attitude lingered. I was skeptical, but it was a lot more comfortable playing jiu-jitsu in a gi in the cold.
And also maddening.
And fun.
My fingertips and cuticles split and bled all over the place the first time I tried. Once they got toughened up enough, it was finger and then wrist and forearm, and then elbow and shoulder pain from all of the gripping.
My friends patiently helped me along.
I had Korean friends.
I didn't even really realize it happened. They invited Jessica along when we'd go out drinking or out to eat (usually the two overlap). We attended every SpiritMC event held in Seoul, met the fighters, met the ring girls, hung out with the sponsors.
We had Korean friends.
We moved back to Canada in 2008, but the pattern of those relationships stuck with me. It's the metric I use to judge every gym I've walked into since then.
A Two-Way Relationship
After Canada and Korea, I tried a gym in Mexico City in 2023. It was good.
I probably won't go back.
Busy gyms rushing people off the mats I understand, if there's another class coming in. But I've been to gyms that were great in every other way, where everyone is ushered off the mats after class for no reason I could figure out.
It feels transactional.
Without realizing it I've always sought out gyms where class ends and there are stragglers sticking around to roll and a bunch of other people just sitting around, hanging out.
The place in Mexico City had great people, good instruction and a very nice facility. It just didn't fit me.
It was a Nolan problem.
If it was the only choice, I'd have stuck with it, but it wasn't.
In Korea in 2005 I had a checklist of things I was looking for, but it was mostly just "good jiu-jitsu nearby."
The autumn before we moved back to Canada, I had been sick and away from the gym for weeks. When I was certain I wasn't going to spread any germs around I stopped by after a class with my student who helped me find the place a couple of years earlier.
Just to say hi to everyone.
관장님 came over, asked me where I had been, and I pointed at my nose and stomach, trying to explain that I wasn't feeling well. He walked over to his bag, pulled out a small food container, took out some sort of root and told me to eat it. Bitter and astringent, but when I was leaving afterwards, the congestion in my head was gone and my stomach had started to feel a lot better.
That wasn't a part of the transaction. He didn't owe me a remedy. He offered because he noticed I was missing.
Dropping into a gym for a few classes while travelling is one thing, but when I'm looking for a place to build my hobby around, the people, the instruction and the facility are important—but what makes me pay any price or travel any distance is something else:
It's a place where our absence is noticed.