‘The Yu Kan-do It Karate dojo looks like a cross between a Japanese tea house and a medieval torture chamber’ – pg 134
When we emailed Melissa to ask if Mike’s karate dojo was based on a real one, she replied with that while she didn’t want to base it off her old karate school, quite a few similarities did sneak in. Melbourne Kyokushin Karate is in the Banana Alley vaults near Flinders Street Station and I quite enjoyed visiting this location because even tho the dojo is initially mentioned in the above quote, it’s also the scene of this hilarious moment later on in LiOS when Sam is trying to get Mike to forgive him after they’ve had a fight. It’s one of my fave parts because it’s so ridiculous and I remember laughing my head off when I read it for the first time (as well as every time since). We went there on a Sunday so there wasn’t a lot going on – it looked mostly empty from the outside when we were trying to discreetly peer in so we got our pic and left pretty quickly, but it was a nice walk, even though it was a bit longer than we expected because google maps didn’t know how to direct us there, onya google maps.
– Rachel
