China Journal 2008-11-13, 1:42PM I May be Addicted

So this week has been one of the hardest weeks yet for my training. I just haven’t had the energy that I usually do. My muscles are really sore, my joints are stiff and I just feel very lethargic. I woke up today at the usual time but immediately went back to sleep. If it wasn’t for the three alarms I set for myself I would have missed class. I remember saying to myself, in my head, “That’s it, I’m skipping training today!” but that third alarm slapped some sense into me. I was a few minutes late but luckily I hadn’t missed anything. The class was as brutal as I thought it would be! We started off with a friendly game of soccer, or “football” as everyone except for me and my American friend call it, and I was sweating buckets by the end of it. We lost, by the way. Next we just had some alone time to stretch. This was nice. Luckily our 老师(aka Laoshi, aka teacher) didn’t feel the need to help us out at all. When we got into the actual movement I had to really force myself to move. My form was hard coming. I stuttered on a few moves and was really feeling tired and fatigued early on. At this point we still had at least a half hour left! After failing at one tricky technique (some may know it, it’s a wushu move where I have to do a spinning cyclone kick but land on my side on the ground) for the umpteenth time I just really wanted to kick a hole in something. I was getting angry at myself for not being able to do it. granted, I have changed from Sanda to Nanchuan, which is a lot more aerobic and has a lot of nice, low stances, but I still shouldn’t be this beat. What is wrong with me? Then it all made sense. The short temper, the self-loathing, the fatigue and exhaustion. Classic signs of withdrawal. I hadn’t had a banana in almost a week. Those sweet, delicious, energy-filled fruits. Packed full of potassium and who knows how many more awesome minerals and nutrients. I heard once that there is enough energy in two average bananas to last someone through an intense 90 min workout easily! Since I discovered how cheap fruit was in china I’ve been eating at least three a day. I recently lost my bank card and am basically broke while waiting for a new one to be sent out so I haven’t been able to buy any. Now I think I may dip into my emergency funds and buy a bunch and a half again.

2008-11-05, 7:32PM New Style and My Dissolving Censor

So I’m no longer studying Sanda. I decided to switch to Nanchuan style Wushu. A benefit of studying Chinese language as well as Kung-Fu is that I know now that Nanchuan translates literally as Southern Fist. This style seems to have a lot of swingy arms and low stances in it and I have nicknamed it “Swingy-arm kung-fu”. My legs are quite sore today because for the last couple of months I have been doing Sanda and I didn’t need to go low for that. The teacher is evil, by the way. The first day we had to do a lot of low stance type stuff and we finished off with three minutes of horse stance followed by ten power of the insteps. Then I had to do it again. My glutes were shaking like a dancer in a rap video. Please don’t picture me doing that. As much as I loved that, that wasn’t the evil part. Stretching back home and stretching in China are very different things. At home, everyone spreads out and stretches. If you’re gung ho, you feel the pain of your ligaments getting longer. It’s painful. Here, we do the same thing except the teacher comes around and pulls your feet and body into the proper position (aka a more painful position) and then they push you down into the stretch until your body wants to die. I think I talked about this before but now that I’m in the different style of kung-fu I think it will be a more common experience and it's just on the top of my mind. Pray for me. If you're not religious, wish my joints luck.

I’ve also discovered a weird side effect of being in a country where very few people understand me. Me and my friends walk down the road and we talk in English together more often than not. Because no one really understands us, we don’t lower our voices when we say crude or objectionable things. This means that my friends and I can often be heard (by an English speaker) swearing, naming body parts, or talking about nearby people in a hilariously offensive way. I have a theory. Most people don’t voice everything that goes through their heads. This is because we all have what I like to call a “censor” that keeps us from saying things that other people would either not appreciate or think was just odd. Because no one understands us we don’t use our censor as often as we usually would back home. I think that when I get back to Canada I will be thought of as a loud, obnoxious person until I get my censor back. I’ll just have to start speaking in Chinese back home to compensate.