hey i don't live in california. thanks for your responses, i know what you guys mean about the quality of training, but.. if the place actually taught what it was worth i probably would have still stayed around. But the thing is, other than the fact the classes are boring (we do the same stuff each class), the instruction is horrible. They don't even tell you how to do a technique, they just have one of their blackbelts do a technique really quick and expect you to figure it out. and most of their blackbelts can't do the moves properly, so it's hard to learn (a lot of them are little kids). since i couldn't learn the techniques from my class I just looked it up from books and learned it liked that, but im tired of doing that all the time. and i've been going for almost a year now and we still haven't started contact sparring. we do no contact sparring every now and than, but barely. i'd say once a month at most. really horrible. thanks for your replies.