An update and current plans

Hello all. I know its been a while, and I have a few free minutes so I thought I'd write a quick update. The past couple of days have been rainy, and the past week and a half I've been working pretty steadily on researching my wushu's history. I've found that my Chinese language skills are helping me to understand my history much easier. The names make more sense to me and I can better formulate an idea of who my martial ancestors were. I also believe that I can detect errors in some of the history reports. Some people are claiming some weird stuff on their webpages, some of which I know cannot be correct since they are translating names from one dialect to another and truncating a character. My understanding is that from one dialect to another, some phrases change and certainly the pronunciations are vastly different, but the characters remain the same. So a three character name is not so easily changed to a two character name in another Chinese dialect. It doesn't make sense. So I'm off fighting battles about wushu instead of using wushu. -Wohoo-

In other news, I have a competition and a demonstration today. The competition was a recital contest, which began at 8am today. I woke up early to meet with the other members of my group so we could practice. I was the only one on time- they other three were 15 minutes late. Maybe I only imagined the time change, but I know for sure I didn't think of it myself because I prefer sleep to a better performance any day of the week. We were second to go on, and considering we only practiced starting Monday of this week, we did OK. We didn't place and didn't get a prize, which I was disappointed not to get a T-Shirt, AND we had to sit through 2 hours or people speaking in Chinese, which none of us could understand, minus our cool teacher, Gan Laoshi. But I was pretty impressed by the competition itself. They canceled classes for the morning (YAY) and held it in a large auditorium. There were about 25 individuals and groups and some were entertaining even without understanding. I felt like part of a big class in there because I saw a lot of friends and everyone was saying hello to others in the audience and screaming for those on stage. I saw some of my Taiji friends there, two of whom also competed. So I got to yell "Jia You" (literally- "add oil") to encourage them.

Ah taiji- this leads to my second demonstration of the day. In 45 minutes I will go to my Taiji class for the afternoon. Its only an hour long, but I'm sure I'll be in a low stance for a big part of it. Its going to make me winded and hurt my already sore legs. I took a week off after the competition because my knees needed the break. Then when I was ready to go back, I got a bad head cold which kept me under the weather, then when I was healed, I was way too lazy to go back to Taiji. So this past Sunday's two hour class was the first time I've been back to Taiji in 3 weeks. That's when they informed me that I would be part of the demonstration after today's class. Meh I don't care. I know the form, and all I have to do is suck it up for 10 minutes to help represent our class. I'm just going to be happy to get back to Robert Sheffield's school. If you guys are reading this, I miss our Chen Jia Xiong Di Hui!

Now for the future: I'm planning a trip to Guangzhou at the end of the semester. I'm still working on the details, but I know I will go to Huangshan for at least 24 hours. It means "Yellow Mountain" and is a major tourist attraction. I think I will go on a Monday or Tuesday, schedule allowing, to avoid the crowds. Apparently its one of China's top 10 sights, and a friend tells me its well worth the trip. I might even be able to camp out in a tent, which is already set up on the mountain. I'll know more once I work up the courage and vocabulary to call the applicable hotel. Then there is a quaint village that I read about in my travel guide, which is supposed to represent traditional China. I think it would offer a nice view, though perhaps on the way back from Shanghai.

Then on to Guangzhou to tour some Chen family highlights. There are a few museums to check out, and recently I discovered a cousin style of Kung Fu, which has an active school in the ?Foshan? area (south of Guangzhou). I'm still working on this. This part will be tough because they speak Guangdong Hua (pinyin), known as Cantonese to the rest of the world. Also, this is the style of cooking that I'm used to in my area of the US. Should be interesting. Luckily I have a friend, Anna, who is traveling to visit family in the area. She speaks fluent Cantonese and has offered to help me translate. I'm looking forward to that, because I'm having enough trouble with Putong Hua ("common dialect") which is the official language of China, yet will hardly be recognized not even 1000 miles south of Shanghai.

Ok ok, I gotta get ready for my demonstration. I'll come re-edit this later with some photos when I find my USB cable for my camera. Oh one last thing- Plane tickets seem somewhat expensive, so I'm currently considering doing all of this traveling by train. I know that from Shanghai to Guangzhou is a 24-hour ride, so we'll see. The expense might be worth it, especially if I can haggle them down (which is totally expected most places... frustrating at times.)

Hope everyone is missing me more than I am them... yeah...

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