My friend Mari-chan's mother teaches Ikebana (1) and I am invited to attend a free lesson Ikebana (2) is the art of flower arrangment, and an art it is! I can choose from various flower bouquets and get a big dish with two bloks with sharp nails. They look like miniature fakir beds. In those I have to arrange the flowers and twigs. Mari-chan helps me and, especially with the help of her mother, the result is beautiful.

But then the real work starts. I have to take the flowers and twigs out of the fakir beds and put them back in by myself. That is not as easy as it sounds. So I remember the sequence in which I took them out, but the twigs never go back in the same way. Of course I wasn't supposed to just copy the original, I had to look at the composition.... leave space so the air could flow through... A lot of corrections needed to be done by the teacher to come to an acceptable result. Anyway, there is a lot of insight and patience necessary to practice the art of ikebana

At the end of the lesson, the flowers and twigs are again removed from the fakir beds. I get the beds as a present, and I can also take the flowers home where I immediately start arranging the flowers again. The result will probably not amount to much in the eyes of an ikebana expert, but I was proud of it. Especially when the flowers opened up, it looked great.