This week, my main woe was that the internet hasn't been working well. For a few days it was working okay in the mornings, other days maybe once in the evening, but for the most part not at all. I'm not even sure when I'll be able to upload this, so I'm trying to get it done as soon as possible.
So! We'll start with Monday. I didn't put a whole lot of effort into Monday's training because I was still pretty tired from the weekend adventure. It started sprinkling during the second morning class, while I was practicing my staff form. Twirling a staff around is not an easy feat when the staff is slippery. But the rain didn't really start coming down until lunch break, which was a shame because I had started my laundry in the morning. I ended up hanging it around my room, which might be everyone's practice during the winter. Now that the grass wakes up covered in frost, hanging your laundry outside to freeze in the night doesn't seem very effective. But they've turned the heat on, which is nice. Well, it's nice for the two hours of the day that it's on. They have a small hill of coal next to the laundry lines for the boiler. At 6:00 in the morning and 5:00 in the evening you can see black smoke belching out of the boiler room. It makes our rooms warm, but is also a rather painful reminder that China isn't huge on carbon footprints.
But, yeah. It's gotten super cold here. The Chinese say that winter starts on November 8th rather than on, like, December 22nd (according to my Western calendar, that's when it's supposed to start). They're sure right about that. December especially has brought out everyone's snow coats, hats, scarves, and gloves. I'm actually going into town today with my roommates to get myself some thermals.
Seriously, if you're reading this and you're planning to come here during the winter, bring a LOT of warm clothing. Two snowcoats, long johns, three sweatshirts, five longsleeves, and thermal underwear is not excessive. Well, especially if you plan on changing your clothing. Some people seem not to.
And we're back to Monday. Because of the cold and the rain, Bagua was held in the Training Hall, and I got a few steps closer to finishing my Bagua form. It was really hard to do without a circle. Apparently, Wu Sifu has the full form on youtube somewhere, but I can't actually look at it in China. Once I get back I'll find it and put the link up. You should check it out.
For some reason, they didn't have Calligraphy on Monday night like they usually do. So, as mentioned in the last post, I watched "Shaolin Temple". It was kind of at the front of my mind when I was writing the bulk of my update on Tuesday.
Tuesday, it continued to rain, though for the morning it was mainly windy. I worked on my staff form for the first class. Usually it's Wing Chun for the first class, but it seemed more prudent to get ready for grading on Wednesday. I've been debating on whether I should continue doing Jumps and Rolls, but for this week I tried it out. I still suck at it, but a bunch of other people do too, so it was okay. We ended up learning some Parkour for the last half hour because one of the guys does it back home in Norway and Sifu thought it was pretty cool. It is. But it's a whole lot harder than it looks.
The afternoon class was Qinan (I've really got to figure out how that's spelled) and it was actually pretty fun. It's nice now that I have a girl to practice with. Makes it less awkward when they need to grab the front of your shirt to attack you. Near the beginning of the class Sifu was trying out his new word: "whatever", and we were trying to help him know how to use it. It depends on the tone of voice you use, really. And then, of course, it's always super fun to have Sifu demonstrate a Qinan move on you. Not. But it makes him laugh a little when you're cringing and rubbing your wrist or shoulder afterwards. Hilarious, Sifu. Hilarious.
Because of the rain I guess Wu Sifu didn't show up for Bagua, so instead of Bagua for the second class, I had a bunch of free time. Arianne had left me some sword oil, so I oiled both my swords, which was actually kind of fun. Sort of like oiling a dutch oven. I need some suggestions for what to name my new sword that I got in Dengfeng. I had named my training sword "The Silver Shadow", but I can't transfer that name to my better sword because it has gold on the sheath and hilt. If you guys have any ideas, let me know.
Wednesday actually turned out to be quite a good day. Well, the morning wasn't too special. Just practicing my staff form and 24-Step Tai Chi. It stopped raining, but the ground was too wet to hold Grading outside, so we did it in the Training Hall.
For Grading, I wore the new outfit I got from Dengfeng. It's one of those Tai Chi Outfits-- you know, the baggy pants, the loose longsleeve shirt with Chinese-type clasps going down the front… it was black. I looked cool. Probably. I pulled off my staff form without making any major mistakes, but I honestly I don't really care about that one. I don't think the staff is my Thing. But I feel like the Tai Chi went really well. I mean, after Grading usually a few people (if they remember) will be like, "oh, good job on your basics" or whatever. But a lot of people came up to me afterward and told me that my Tai Chi form looked really good. That was pretty gratifying. It made Wednesday a good day.
Thursday. We started learning a new Qi Gong form, called "Yi Jing Ji" or something like that. The one that we've been practicing up to now was called "Ba... Something". I just remember the "ba" part because it has eight movements, and "ba" is the Chinese word for eight.
Conditioning was super weird. On the exercise where your hit your forearms against someone else's forearms (or against a tree, sometimes), the guy I was with was giving an absurd amount of power, and I could feel that he was. But it legitimately didn't hurt. Of course that's the point of conditioning, but it was really weird to actually experience it. Once again, Sifu decided that my partner for the shoulder/bicep punching wasn't putting enough power on my arm, so he helped me condition. Thanks, man. Nice to know he's watching out for me.
Power Training, as usual, wasn't fun. The Favorite Exercise of the class was push-ups, or staying in the push-up position with your feet on the ledge for what felt like several minutes. Why do I get the feeling he's going to make us do handstand push-ups next week? I need to get a video of people doing the "chicken steps" exercise. It's like, you squat all the way down and put your hands behind your back, and take tiny steps forward. It looks really funny. I feel like we're all little video game minions, and Mario's gonna jump onto our heads at any given minute.
Friday had a lot of ups and downs. The morning got me pretty annoyed. At the beginning of the first class (Power Stretching), one of the translators suddenly came up to me and said that in fifteen minutes I would have to get in a taxi to go extend my visa. What? Okay, whatever. I had given them my passport earlier in the week for this purpose, but no one had said anything about going into town. Oh well.
I went with a couple of other guys who also needed their visas extended. We first went to get some pictures taken for the visa photo. I have two extra if you want me to autograph them for you. Then we headed over to the police station. We pasted our photos on some documents, signed some stuff, got our picture taken, watched the same old Chinese lady walk by the office to look at us at least six times, and then got a receipt. We would have to pay the receipt at the bank.
I looked at my receipt and was sure there was some mistake. I had heard that the visa extension would cost 500 yuan at the very most. I looked at the other guy's, and they were all at around 250. But mine? 940 yuan.
940 yuan, "because I'm American". And that's only for two extra months, zero entrance.
What the heck?
I made it sound like the whole document pasting and signing went by quickly, but it didn't. It seriously felt like it took forever. Probably an hour. And then the bank took, like, half an hour because we had to wait in line and stuff. So, because we were by that time too late for lunch, we all went and got chicken burgers and hailed a taxi. I let the guys pay for the taxi.
That bogus visa price made me fume over my lunch break, and I totally wanted to fume for longer, but I think I have some sort of miswiring in my system because I couldn't get myself to feel truly upset about it for much longer than that. Or maybe training just distracted me. 940 yuan, by the way, is $146 USD. Grr.
Friday afternoon class is a Free Period, so I asked Sifu if I could do Power Stretching because I had missed it that morning. Honestly, that wasn't one of my better ideas. I'm actually getting really close to the splits, but only when Sifu is pushing down on my hips and shoulders. The thing about being the only person doing Power Stretching is you don't get a little break between one leg and the other, because he's not leaving you alone to stretch someone else. After about four stretches I had to call it quits out of sheer self-preservation.
Apparently, in town you can buy some pretty nice BB guns for cheap. Young Sifu doesn't actually own one (I think?) but he borrowed a shotgun-type one from one of the guys and was having fun shooting leaves and stuff. I tried it, and it was pretty nice. Apparently it's pretty painful. So while students weren't asking him questions or being tortured, he was messing around with that during class.
I have to admit I skipped Acupuncture. Basically all we do is write down (or just watch him point out) pressure points and hear the explanation on them. I mean, sure it's interesting, but I think I've got all the ones written down that he's willing to teach us. I'm pretty sure I even have repeats. Now the next step would be to study them. Which I probably won't do.
In the evening after dinner, me and my two roommates tried out a Chinese bathhouse, which was pretty nice mostly because it had a sauna. It was 40 kuai per person, and you could pay more if you wanted a massage and stuff. Fortunately for this American, Chinese massage places are really cheap, even if the visas aren't. I really wanted a massage that night, but we decided to get one on Saturday instead.
And then we had a super eventful Saturday. My two roommates, my roommate's boyfriend and me all decided to go into town together to get massages, eat lunch, and hit the supermarket. Going into town with people is quite a bit different than going by yourself. You have to gage everyone's opinions, for one thing. One of my roommates is considerably more outspoken than her boyfriend, the other girl, and in most cases, me. If she had been the one who had been here for three months instead of me, we definitely would've wound up following her all day. I mean, not that she was bossy. Just a little more adventurous.
We went to the massage place that everyone talks about, and got the full body massage, 138 kuai. Although nice, I didn't really feel like it did me a lot of good. Not a lot of working over going on. I should try to find a place that really works on your back, because mine sort of hurts. Maybe it's just bruised from conditioning, though… But I've gotta say, massages are a little better when you get them in the evening and can go home and sleep. Going back out onto the cold street to shop was a little bit of a shock.
For lunch, we were heading to a noodle place I know but wasn't totally set on, but then spotted a place that sort of looked like a fast food thing. More like a buffet, actually. So we went in and got some stuff, and it was fairly good food for-- not dirt cheap, but really inexpensive compared to what it would cost in America. It was really funny to my Italian roommate how much we were getting stared at, as Westerners using chopsticks and all that. I feel so used to it now that I almost feel weird when people don't look at me.
When we got into the taxi to head to the supermarket, we had two choices for it: Bai Yi or InZone. I'm the only one who's been to both, so I decided that we would go to InZone. To make the taxi drivers understand you, you have to pronounce it a little different, more like "Yin Zuo". So I said it like that to the driver, and he was saying it back to me a little bit weird, but I assumed he understood and we started off. And then we started driving in a direction that I felt was weird. After a few minutes, I realized that we had gone, like, way too far. So I said again to him, "Yin Zuo? Yin Zuo?", and he was like, "Yangzhou?", and I'm like "aw, snap." He totally tried to take us to the train station. Luckily I had stopped him before the meter went too high. That was actually the first time the language barrier had been a problem with a taxi driver.
Once we got to the supermarket, we had a ball looking at all the weird Chinese foods, and occasionally buying some. I found some hawthorne (no idea how you spell that or if that's really the thing I'm talking about) candy! Before I leave I'm going to go back and get a whole lot of it to bring back with me to America. Really, it's one of the few Chinese candies that legitimately tastes like candy, and it's because they taste like a really powerful fruit. One of my goals was to get some pairs of thermals, but we didn't find any at the supermarket. I was sort of worried that people wouldn't want to stop in town on the way back to school and I wouldn't end up getting my thermals, but on the contrary we ended up staying out even after I had gotten them at the Underground and looked around a bit more. On the Food Street (not far from the Underground and Milkshake Shop), there's a bunch of street food. The main delights this time of year are corn on the cob and fried octopus on a stick. But if you were really adventurous, you could get a cooked dog skull, with (I'm assuming) the brain still inside. No joke. We tried to get a picture of it, but the guy shooed us away. Maybe selling edible dog skulls is against the law in Qufu?
We looked around a bit more, I nabbed a book of Confucius Sayings (with English translations, of course) off of a stand for 5 kuai, and pretty soon we got us a taxi and got back to the school with our key phrase, "Shaolin Wushu Xue Xiao".
And that was my week! Although in some ways it feels like every week of training turns out the same, life is built in such a way that you can never have the same day twice. Really, going into this whole blog thing I felt like I would just be repeating everything. Like, 'this week we had training. I ran around the fish ponds for the 350th time'. But I talk about different things, right? We have field trips, and I go to town, and sometimes we watch movies in the training hall if it's pouring outside. Every day it gets colder, every week I get a little bit closer to doing the splits.
Anyway.
Question time! Thank you to my awesome Grammy for submitting some questions this week.
I'd like to know if you have a calligraphy pen set that you can use to practise drawing bamboo leaves and stems with for hours?
I do have two calligraphy brushes that I got in Beijing (let me know if you want any, they're pretty cheap and I've seen them here in Qufu), but we haven't actually drawn any bamboo leaves yet. Mostly a lot of straight lines. :)
I also wonder if Shaolin masters are required to be celibate.
The answer to that is no. If you're sworn in to be a monk and you live at the temple and stuff I think it's different, but our headmaster here, Wei Sifu, is actually married to a lovely woman, Joy, who speaks great English and they have a little son about ten months old. His English name is Luke, but I can never seem to remember his Chinese name. So… yeah. I mean, no. What?
I also wonder if you pronounce the letter Chinese Q like English CH? How do you write the French sound for J in Chinese? Also, have you studied Bo Po Mo Fo?
That's exactly right! So, "Qufu" actually sounds like "Chew Foo". Pinyin was established in China about 50 years ago to help foreigners know how to pronounce it, but it's not all exactly how you would think it would be pronounced. Like, the "Bo Po Mo Fo" exercise (which we studied in Beijing with a tutor-- I haven't learned it here as of yet) sounds more like they're saying "Bwoh Pwoh Moh Foh". And when you see a "C" in Pinyin, it's pronounced "Ts". Crazy, right? You know, I don't think they actually have a soft "J". "Zh" is as close as it gets because it's not quite as hard as "J".
Thanks so much for sending me questions, Grammy! I love reading your mission updates, and I'm so proud of you guys.
I wish I had a good picture of me in my Shaolin outfit during Grading, but I still need to collect pictures and video from people...
Until next week,
Sarah
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