A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

Two more cities done: Qufu and Shanghai. Now we're in Hangzhou. This is what I experienced in the last couple days... Qufu Qufu was... disappointing. In fact, besides the three main tourist sights (which are all Confuzius-related), there's just not so much to see and do in Qufu. True, there's the [Qufu Shaolin School] , but I didn't go there for a couple of reasons. First, when inquring prices before going to China, I got a reply stating that a single lesson cost 1000y. That's rather odd, considering a whole month doesn't run that much. Then again, the folks there specialize in long-term students (which they stated in the mail, too), so they just didn't have any standard fees for one time students. Ok, fair enough. Still, I'm not particularly fond of Shaolin Kung Fu. If you've been reading my blog for some time, you might have noticed that I'm not exactly a fan of patterns. Shaolin practice is mostly that - [taolu], for several hours a d

Our first day here in Nanjing has just ended. Before coming here, we went to Luoyang, then Deng Feng and then Luoyang again. Deng Feng was the first real disappointment for me... Don't get me wrong - the Shaolin Temple is beautiful and the area around it is filled with Wushu schools, so when I arrived, I felt kind of at home. However, just like so many things here in China, Shaolin (maybe not the temple, but pretty much everything around it) is big business today. Ironically, we met Pavel, a polish guy who now lives in Shanghai, who used the very same phrase... I'm not sure if he's a tour guide, in any case he was helping a chinese tour guide organize a polish group. Since we had questions regarding the Kung Fu show (more on that later) and my polish is much better than my chinese (although that's getting better, too), I decided to ask Pavel, who obviously had a plan about what was going on. A small discussion arose from that question and at one point I asked him if he

Xi'An was a blast. I didn't get to train (other than following [the naked warrior] and tossing in some pull-ups), but I had some nice insights into the chinese martial arts. After my experiences in Beijing regarding the price of martial arts lessons, I decided against going to [Zhao Changjun's Kung Fu Institute] . We're just in the middle of our second week and budget's pretty tight, so I guess I can't go everywhere I planned. After doing all the major sights (without the Terracotta Army, that is - we're pretty satiated after that week in Beijing when it comes to hardcore sightseeing...), we had some spare time in the evening, so we just went to a nearby park. Now it looks like I've been looking in the wrong places so far - in the park, they did everything: Taiji, Gongfu (I recognized [Xingji] and [Sanda] , I'm sure they did more styles - ironically, that group apparently was a summer class offered by Zhao's school), western boxing, even dance