Carlson Gracie Sr - Fabio Araujo - Jerry Sonenarong

I live in a small town in China which is mainly a tourist spot. There are no BJJ gyms, except from the one we founded. I started training BJJ with a few friends by initially learning from one that had a blue belt in GJJ (one of these online belts from Rener and Ryron Gracie). This friend has learned from another one (also a GJJ blue belt) who created the first group in Dali but then left. By chance or maybe the position of the stars at that time (2019), after a month of training twice a week two blue belts training in Chiang Mai, Thailand visited our gym and asked us to do open mat. No idea what that meant and also I had no idea what nogi was. I showed up and not knowing what to do, one of them told me: 'just beat me up'. That was my first spar who totally blew my mind. Like we all know, I was totally useless and these guys were just ragdolling me. It was amazing. I needed to learn all the magic arts these guys had. We started watching videos and train 3-4 times a week, beating up each other, sharing knowledge, and building up strong friendship. Been 6 and a half years now, still no instructor, just active learning, research and lot of trial and error. Each of us travels a lot, visit gyms, and we received many visits. Paramount for us is our relation with our friend prof. Jerry Wutang Sonenarong from CDBJJ in Chengdu. We all visited his gym, sparred with his guys and some of them visit us every now and then. We organize 2 training camps per year in our gym in Dali, led by Jerry who checks on our progress and does belt promotions. We recently started joining competitions and we are doing fairly well. We frequently had new people joining and initially we were expecting everybody to be an active learner because that was how the group was functioning. We were wrong. Most of the people prefer to pay (there was no fee actually, we all payed to the guesthouse lady where the gym was built by the guy who created and left, but she didn't even wanted us to pay...) to have a coach teach them... This is why we understood that we had to teach proper classes to help new people integrate. We now have a growing group, surprisingly almost 50/50 men and ladies, we created a proper (or almost) gym with its name: Dali BJJ (yeah couldn't come out with anything more creative lol), we also have a kids group. The atmosphere is relaxed and super friendly, we often have visits. Hope to see you in Dali if you happen to pass by, I'm sure you'll love it!