Ni hao, everyone!
Almost exactly a month later, I'm finally writing in my blog! Or sending out e-mails, as the case may be. I've promised to send this out to a couple of people, especially those who live here in China and therefore cannot access ma blog.
For this post I'll just be talking about the facilities, and then next time I'll talk about the training. That's the plan, anyway.
Well. The short version of why I haven't updated my blog yet is that I haven't had the internet for the past month. Honestly, it takes a lot of babysitting the head honchos at the School to get anything done, and by the time I was finally on top of it, three weeks had passed and then if I waited another week then I might as well just wait three weeks and not have to pay as much because I'd be with my family for those two weeks traveling to Mongolia and and Xi'an.
Ming bai le? (Do you understand?)
I'm a bit lucky, I guess, because I'm not completely starting from scratch on how to start this thing off. I've kept a journal of almost every day that I've spent so far at the Kung Fu School.
Oh! If you're getting into this a little late, then… yeah, I'm a little tired of having to explain this. I'm learning Kung Fu in China cuz my friend was talking about it a few years ago and I wanted to do it and got a job and here I am.
Anyways. The goal of this blog is to give someone an idea of what it's like to go to the school in Qufu, so I guess I'll just have a lot of explaining about what the training and rooms and everything is like. Then in later posts when I've fallen into a rhythm I can talk more about the daily life and what I've discovered about the type of people who decide to run away and learn Kung Fu in China.
Because, I had no idea what to expect.
I arrived at the school on a warm Sunday evening. September 4th, 2011. I had spent the last two weeks with my family in Beijing, and we saw the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and eventually got over the idea that we were suddenly on the other side of the world.
The plane ride wasn't so bad, by the way. We had a direct flight from Seattle to Beijing, so it was, like… 11 hours? Compared to some road trips I've taken that hardly took any time at all. But I've already talked about the plane ride in a previous post, so I'll move on to the train ride from Beijing to Qufu.
I was pretty lucky because they had just finished the new Beijing to Shanghai speed train, which cut my journey to Qufu from 8 hours to 2 hours. The speed train was pretty nice and modern-looking, and it goes up to 310 km/h. The kilometers to miles thing kinda hurts my head, but I think that's about 200 mph. Like, whoa. My dad came with me to drop me off at the school and "look everyone in the eye" as my mom would say. Joy, the headmaster's wife and English Speaking Extraordinaire, came to pick me up with a car. Dad and I dragged our (my) two suitcases of clothing/essentials over and squeezed them and my backpack into the trunk. I kept hold of my ukulele and small purse.
Yes, I brought a ukulele. There are several guitars at the school, and I hear there's a piano, but I haven't actually hunted that down yet.
As we drove closer to the school, I could feel my insides tensing up in nervousness. A lump of anxiety rose in my throat as Joy pointed out the different places in the town: the ATMs-- the Youth Hostel (where a lot of people from the school go to drink-- I decided then to avoid it)-- the Confucius Temple, which is particularly famous because Qufu was Confucius' birthplace.
I'm usually a pretty easy-going person, but for some reason that fifteen minute car ride really got to me. I did ask a few questions, but when it comes to learning about a new place my automatic way of thinking is "I'll find out when I get there and if I don't I'll ask later". That shut my mouth even more tightly than usual. I did ask how many foreign students there were, and I then found out that they only take international students! No Chinese Nationals whatever. And everyone, except a few of the Masters, speaks English.
But, we finally arrived and my curiosity was soon put to rest during the little tour and in the coming days.
The school is quite a bit smaller than I thought it was from the website (www.shaolinskungfu.com). It's hard to say exactly how big, because there's some trees blocking the view of the pagodas, but I'll be taking some video (I've already taken a little, actually). You could probably divide the grounds into two sections. Well, three.
The very front of the school has a little area that I feel like doesn't belong to us, mostly because it seems to be an area used for making corn. When we drove in,the driveway was covered with a layer of corn seeds, with just enough room for a car to get through. The front section also houses the Masters (Sifus), the staff, and the two translators. Those two dorm buildings are on either side of the gate.
When you walk through said gate, you come to section two. There's a sort of… pond that sits right in the middle of section two, but it's man-made, and it's really divided into four ponds. It's a little hard to describe, really. But you can start by imagining a large, rectangular, concrete pond, and the short side is closest to you. Then that's divided down the middle (longways, traveling away from you) by a long concrete bridge, in the middle of which is an ornate pagoda, complete with a hammock and stone table. A little farther on are three Chinese-style huts, arranged in a straight line so that you can see all three, which have their own concrete bridge connecting the two long sides of the rectangle. If you scoot around the large hut in the middle, you can now see the dining huts, which are across smaller sections of pond. There the pond ends in a lot of lily pads.
Around this whole arrangement runs a sort of dirt track, which we run around before every class to warm up. I really couldn't say how big it is, but one lap around is easy to do and two laps isn't so bad. There are several huts just outside this track. The Headmaster (Wei Sifu) and his family live in one, and students who have paid for single bedrooms live in the others.
The third section has a small training area, then the Student Dorm Building, kitchen, training hall, showers/bathroom/laundry room, and a little glade just behind the dorm building that has trees lined up in perfect rows that are great for, like, punching.
But overall, the school is a nice size, especially since there's only thirty students. Unfortunately, the conditions were quite a bit more primitive than I was expecting as well. One dorm room is fairly sizable, maybe 15 feet wide and 25 feet long. The high ceilings make it seem bigger. Someone before me had put glowy stars above my bed (I'd love to know how they got up there to do so), but that's about all that's left of anyone who came before. The floor is concrete of questionable cleanliness, and the two people who share the room each get a bed, a wardrobe, and a desk/chair. There's also an extra bed, desk, and stool. Oh, and two little bedside table things and fans.
The beds. Oh my. I almost thought they were joking when I first sat down on mine. Nope! Not joking. It's a standard 1 1/2 foot high frame, maybe 7-8 feet long, 3 feet wide. But all that the frame has over its wooden boards is a sort of red mat stuffed with straw, and a thick quilt that serves as a mattress liner. Because it was still hot at the beginning of September, we used a really big towel for a blanket. The first night I had quite a bit of trouble sleeping on that, but you get used to it fairly quickly and now it's almost comfortable. They also provide you with a pillow. Once it started getting cold you could exchange your towel for a big duvet.
The other furniture I didn't have any complaints with-- except that my wardrobe was broken. It's was about seven feet tall, two feet wide, and had one shelf about a foot and a half up that divides it into two sections. This shelf was broken.
Quick story about that. I figured the solution to that was to switch the wardrobe with one that wasn't broken. By Day 4 I had gotten a little annoyed that that hadn't been done yet, so during lunch break I cleared away all my stuff from the wardrobe and set out to track down Nelly (one of the translators) or Joy, and asked my roommate where one of them might be so I could switch my wardrobe. She kind of looked at me funny and said that it had already been fixed! I had cleared all of my stuff off of it and hadn't even noticed that it now had supports in it. Awkward.
Yeah. I'm just grateful I didn't walk all the way out to find Joy and show everyone just how unobservant I am.
Anyway, the other life essentials are eating, showers, toilet, and washing clothes.
The meals are at 7:00, 12:00, and 6:00. The kitchen staff wheels out a little cart to set up rice, bowls, chopsticks, spoons, teapots/cups, hot water thermoses, and the plates of food. Apparently the food gets really repetitive, but I'm liking it so far. You dish some rice into your bowl, put a bunch of Chinese-dish toppings on, and if you're thirsty you can pour yourself some hot boiled water. Then you use chopsticks to eat, which I think is kind of fun. For breakfast it's always boiled eggs, powdered soy milk (which you mix in a bowl of hot water) and steamed bread or another type of roll. While there's often a variety of lunch/dinner dishes, the breakfast is always the same thing.
One of the huts on the pond is the school's shop, which I guess you could say is like our bookstore. It sells t-shirts, training shoes, water bottles, and toilet paper. And Snickers, of course. A lot of the people say that the Snickers bars they sell in the shop is the only decent chocolate available, and they seem a little addicted. But I tried one and honestly they weren't that great. Completely frozen and I'm not a huge Snickers fan anyway. I only really go to the shop when I really need something, like water or toilet paper. It's a little awkward, with Shop Guy watching you. For the first few weeks you didn't have to pay right away, you just wrote it in Shop Guy's book. But a few weeks in, everyone had built up a lot of credit and they finally said that you had to pay as you went because otherwise the shop couldn't function properly. Not sure why they didn't just do that right off.
Yeah. Segue! The shop sells toilet paper because they don't provide you with your own in the toilet room. There's only 8 girls, so we get a smaller toilet, I think. You walk in, and there's two choices: Squat Pot or Western Toilet. There's a little basket next to each, filled with used toilet paper, because if you flush it the toilet will get blocked up. That would've been good to know the first day. Luckily nothing bad happened.
The showers aren't as bad as I imagined-- you get your own little stall, and I was imagining all sorts of horrible situations where you'd have to function like a public shower and stuff. The temperature's a bit testy, and one out of the three only runs cold. The best way to do it is bring a bag with your shampoo, soap, and towel, making sure to wear a pair of plastic sandals (which I got from the market in town on my first weekend). I lost two bottles of shampoo in the first week because I had forgotten to carry them out and they disappeared when I remembered and looked for them the next day.
The washers took me a little while to figure out. The first time I tried it I asked one of the guys and I'm sure he explained it very well, but his first language is French, so some of it got lost in his accent. But then I did it again later and that time I had an American guy helping me, so now I've got it totally figured out. You bring in your own laundry detergent (or "washing-up soap" as most of the British people seem to want to call it), and use a hose to fill it, let it spin in cold water for 45 minutes, and then rinse it as best as you can, otherwise it'll be stiff after it dries on the line. Eezy Peezy Lemon Squeezy.
Something that really bothered me in my first few weeks was that most of the surfaces you see just aren't clean. The showers, especially. I'm pretty sure they regularly clean the toilets, but those shower walls make me want to go out and get some Soft Scrub and scrub them down myself. Ditto with my walls-- though they're not as bad as you imagine when I say that. Some sort of surface cleaner and a roll of paper towels would take care of that one easily.
Well, I think that's enough for today. I don't want to put everything I've learned in the month into one post, amirite?
So.
Will Sarah ever get her wish of a clean hot shower?
Will we ever eat something besides white rice for dinner?
Whose cat is that, anyway?
All that and more will be answered (probably) in the next installment of:
SOMEWHAT SHAOLIN
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