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.