Tuesday, November 21, 2006

The gong fu school I

Okay, so you might be wondering why I haven't posted anything. The reason is that I can't access blogspot.com, it seems that it can't be accessed anywhere in China.

Anyway, I'm surfing through a computer in Japan (from china) and it works perfectly fine. I ended up in a different Gong fu school, since I heard some bad rumours about the one I chose.

The school is quite large, and consists of maybe 100 chinese students, age 5-20. Most of them are probably poor, and was put on the school by the parents so that they could make something out of their lives. Some will join the police force or maybe military force. Some will be Wu shu teachers, and one or two might be film actresses or stuntmen.

We train 7 days a week, but were have sunday afternoons off and 4 days at the end of every month. There are 4 western people at the school, and we train directly under the shifus. We don't train the same things as the chinese. They mostly train modern wushu, while we train traditional gong fu. The difference is that Wu shu is most for show and consists a lot of acrobatics and fast moves, but lacks force and power. Traditional gong fu is slower and less beautiful but consits greater force and can be used for fighting.

Some students train Sanda, which is pure combat fighting. I will begin to train that in a couple of months, but now I'm focusing on Gong fu and Tai Chi.

The reason the chinese students train Wu shu, is because the chinese goverment loves it. It is beautiful for sure, I'll make sure to post some pictures soon.