Hey everyone! Sorry I'm late this week. Over the weekend I traveled with a bunch of people from my group, and we took our Sifu to the ocean because he'd never been before. More on that in a bit.
Grading went well!
Well, except that I was supposed to grade four things, and Leah accidentally didn't put me down for 24-Step Tai Chi. But it's okay, I can just grade it next month. Last month grading took maybe an hour, hour and a half. But this time? Two and a half hours. It was a little nicer for people who were actually grading, but a lot of people were just sitting on the hard cement steps for that long. Luckily it wasn't cold (at the beginning, anyway). It was also Halloween, so I dressed up as a person who does Kung Fu.
Monday night was Calligraphy, and Nellie had to (or rather, decided to) substitute because the teacher, a local taxi driver, couldn't come. I was getting kind of bored of drawing lines, so I asked Nelly if she could give me a Chinese name, and it ended up being an interesting little lesson on how Chinese names are built. My name is Zhāng Sài Yuán, which roughly means "Open", "Race/Win", "(Beautiful) Lady". Well, "Zhāng" can mean "open", but it's really just a fairly common surname. In fact, all the Sifus here except Wei Sifu and Wu Sifu have that surname-- that's one of the reasons that we gave them all nicknames. You can't really call everyone "Zhang Sifu" without some confusion happening.
I've forgotten bits of last week… oh! I started my staff form. I've forgotten what it's called. But I borrowed one of John's staffs (he's been here for two years. He has several.) and Sifu first set us to practicing "flowers", which is when you just twirl the staff on either side of you. Sifu can do it crazily fast, but I'm still a little slow at it. Need more practice. More power.
I skipped Jumps and Rolls on Tuesday for two reasons: I suck at it and Young Sifu wasn't teaching because of his foot. I had gone the previous week when another Sifu was teaching, but it just wasn't the same, you know? I basically sat out the second half hour with a couple of other students because everyone else was doing standing frog jumps.
Wednesday evening we got our train tickets, and it was awesome to have someone who spoke Chinese (because Sifu came with us). Next time I get train tickets I need to bring one of the translators along. Or call Nellie?
Thursday it started sprinkling right after Qi gong (the first class), but it was light enough that we could do conditioning without a problem. Afternoon power training actually wasn't too bad this time. I could still walk afterwards.
The exciting event of Thursday was that during power training, some people in Wei Sifu's class were doing piggy-back in the rain. Two of the German guys were going, but the guy doing the carrying (Phil) tried to go too fast, slipped, and twisted his ankle so he couldn't walk on it. Fortunately, it wasn't broken. This we discovered on Friday, when Acupuncture class happened.
Every other Friday, Wu Sifu teaches Acupuncture instead of the second hour of Bagua. Usually he just tells us about pressure points for the whole lesson, and I take notes as fast as I can, drawing little pictures of body parts and stuff. This time, Phil limped in at the beginning, and Wu Sifu's face brightened. He… yeah. He gave Phil acupuncture treatment. We have pictures. If anyone gets my mom's updates, it's similar to the treatment that my dad got in Beijing for his shoulder. But this one was certainly more informal. Instead of starting out with a massage, Wu Sifu had him sit down, told someone to hold his upper body still, and then yanked his ankle really hard, twice. Then he did some acupuncture, putting needles in at different places up his lower leg. He disinfected them first, of course. After that came the "globe" treatment, which was a little gross to watch, because the skin kind of went up into the little circular globe thing when Wu Sifu sucked the air out of it with a contraption.
Amazingly, the acupuncture treatment seems to have worked, because Phil was back on his feet on Monday, though he says his ankle's pretty stiff. I'm pretty sure without the treatment he wouldn't be walking right now.
And then, of course, we went to Qingdao!
Friday night, five of us from Young Sifu's class plus Sifu took the midnight train going anywhere…but mostly to Qingdao.
They didn't have a speed train there, but they had one back, so we took the sleeper train. I had taken the sleeper train before, but the difference was that that one had been a soft sleeper, and this one was a hard sleeper. The soft sleeper has compartments with a door, four beds each. The hard sleeper has no doors, and six beds per space. I'd say that the soft sleeper was slightlymore comfortable, but there again appeared the problem of not being able to sleep because of a Chinese guy snoring beneath you. So, not a huge difference.
But anyway, we all got off the train, and Fritz and Sifu came out with a bunch of extra things. I was pretty confused for a second until I saw that they were helping an old lady. Turns out, the old lady had taken a liking to Sifu and they figured out that she was from his hometown. She was sort of smiling and pointing at me and talking, and Sifu was a trooper and translated that she thought I was cute. That certainly won her a lot of points in my book, especially since I was still in sweats and hadn't yet figured out what to do with my hair. After we (meaning, the boys) helped her carry her stuff out to a taxi, she invited us to her house for breakfast but we ended up turning her down (most likely out of politeness, but I don't speak Chinese, so I'm not sure what she and Sifu were discussing). We instead had a buffet breakfast at a hotel which was pretty nice. A nice change from the soy milk/eggs/roll combo that we usually get.
Beforehand, Fritz (the planning extraordinaire) had figured out a good hostel to go to, but we had a lot of trouble finding it because no one had the address written down. But it was okay because that meant we got to walk around the city a little bit.
Qingdao is a SERIOUSLY pretty city. I mean, of course it had a standard downtown area with big buildings, but the area where the hostel was was really European. I would say that Qingdao= (Seattle x a German Town) + China. Thinking of my mom, I tried to take plenty of pictures of the architecture.
After we found the hostel we stopped by a standard little noodle place, though the lady out front scared me half to death with her huge hair. It's hard to go wrong with those little noodle places. A lot of times they'll have a picture menu up on the wall, but even better than that we had a guy who spoke Chinese with us (victory pose), so everything we got was good.
Once we got all of our stuff settled in at the hostel, I re-packed my backpack for beach wear and we headed out to try and find the beach. We learned that if you got on the 228 bus and rode quite a ways you could get a really nice one, so we dutifully hopped on. We passed some bits of beach, but we knew that there was a really nice one past the downtown area, so we stayed on for quite a long time, until suddenly the driver told us to get off and we realized we had gotten to the end of the route. Oops! But it was an okay mistake because we needed to get an ATM anyway, and that was quickly located. We dithered a little bit about what to do, and Sifu went off and asked some people where the beach was. We had totally and completely passed it. So we got back on the 228 bus in the opposite direction and somehow managed to figure that out.
It was kind of an overcast day, but luckily it wasn't too cold. We did end up swimming, and I finally found a chance to use the swimsuit that I brought to China. It was Sifu's first time at the ocean, and it was really cute how awesome he thought it was. Most of us swam except one guy who wanted to guard the stuff instead. We took a bunch of pictures and headed back to the hostel.
By then it was maybe 4:30, so I headed downstairs to the lounge and all the guys were pretty engaged with the pool table. I didn't play pool, but luckily I had my Nook with me and I started reading "A Thousand Pieces of Gold" which was SUPER good. I'm actually on my second time reading it right now. It's a book about Chinese proverbs and how they come from Chinese history. I recommend it to anyone who likes anything.
Because the hostel food was good, we just ate dinner and breakfast the next day there. It was an international hostel, so they had Western food! That was rather exciting. By about 10:30 Sunday morning everyone had trickled down the lounge and eaten breakfast. I got all of my stuff packed up and we were ready to go by about 11:00. While we were waiting for other people, someone pulled out a game that they had discovered last night. I have a feeling it's called "Go", but I can't remember the Chinese name. You have a board that's a bit like a grid, and two players have their own small black or white circular pieces. The point of the game is to get five of your pieces in a row-- sort of like tic tac toe. Fritz got really into it, figuring out tactics and all that. I got a little pulled into that and now I'm a bit addicted. We ended up finding a store in town that had mini sets of them, so I've got my own now. :)
Anyway, before we went to said store, we decided to just walk around town for a bit since it was turning out to be a nice day. We found a cathedral and took some pictures on the pathway leading up to it. When we walked up to it, we found a whole lot of brides taking pictures on the windy square in front of it. This seems to be a big thing in China. Whenever you go to a really pretty and potentially touristy spot, you find brides having their pictures taken, with an optional groom.
And then we walked down to a multi floor market, where we found the games. I also bought a Chinese Chess Set which I got mostly because it looked cool. Nellie says she'll teach me how to play.
As we were walking out, we spotted one of those Huge Nut Cake Vendors that I totally forgot to mention. These guys have these seriously huge cake things that look like they're made of nuts that have been molded together, with like dates or something on top for decoration. They're probably a foot thick, and 4x4 feet wide, easy. They cart them around on wheelbarrows and cut off a section for any sucker who decides to buy some. Fritz decided to buy some. The piece that he decided to cut off was about an 1 inch thick, 8 inches long, and almost a foot high. It ended up being two kilos! Which, unfortunately, equaled out to 160 kuai. Fortunately for everyone, it doesn't taste too bad. Sort of like a Snickers without the chocolate. We'll see if it can all be eaten before it goes bad.
We actually didn't end up getting lunch before we went into the train station, but some of the guys had bought things at the game market, plus we had the nut stuff which was rather filling. We got on the speed train, which was only 3 hours compared to the 8 hours we spent getting to Qingdao. When we got back we barely missed dinner, but I had earlier gotten an instant noodles bowl (thank you, Sarah from the past) just in case something like this happened.
And that was our trip! It was really quite nice. Everyone got along and looked out for each other. Maybe if we had been more than two days together it could've turned sour, but a weekend was the perfect amount of time to spend with a bunch of people you don't really know. In fact, it was almost too much time. I'm feeling a little bit social'd out. I sort of want another weekend.
Will Young Sifu's foot ever get better? Will Sarah's family convince her to visit them on their last weekend in Beijing? Will the Chinese Mafia force Wei Sifu to pay them in blood?
All that and more on the next week's episode of
SOMEWHAT SHAOLIN
PS: the picture is of my Sifu, getting all excited about seeing the ocean.
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