Week 2 (11 January - 17 January)

On the 11th (monday) it was a special day to honour the kids and all of their parents came to watch them perform. We also watched the kids perform and it is amazing to see kids as young as 7 doing backflips and other crazy moves. The kids also have a 1 month holiday now so they can go home and spend some time with their family, it is the only holiday they get.

Every 11th of the month there is a test day on which all foreigners must present the forms they have learnt, because the kids performed on this day we had test day on the 12th. Luckily I didn't need to perform anything because my form isn't finished yet. Also my upper hip muscle really hurts, it is the same pain I experienced from a previous injury plus my knee is also still extremely painful, probably from all the running out in the cold.

On Wednesday (13th) the shaolin group had to go for their weekly run, we had to run to the nearby village called Yehe which is 10km from the academy, so the total run is about 20km at -25 celcius. I ran together with my friend Chima from Trinidad, at about 6km from the academy there is a sign at which point we decided to turn back. The bottle of water I was carrying at frozen solid, my eyelids and nose were covered in ice crystals.

Before

After

Later that day training continued like usual and in the evening we had a line up and a huge lecture. Somebody had decided to defecate next to the toilet and the headmaster wanted to know who had done it. Personally I don't believe any of the western students would have done such a thing, it became a huge joke. In the evening I spoke to Steffen, a student from Norway which was leaving soon. I told him I would move into his room and buy most of his basic necessities, his room is also upstairs and faces the sun, so it is warmer and has a much better view.




Thursday 14th, I started learning a new form and had to buy a shaolin dao (training sword), the training is going well and I can notice that my stretching has improved already. However I am still concerned about my knee and hip which are still rather painful.

Friday 15th, today we only trained half the day which is normal for friday, in the evening there was a very rare sun eclipse which we observed. The weekend was really boring, I played some pool in the pool room which they ocasionally open but other than that I was too tired to do anything else and just wanted to rest and let my body recover. The weather is still nothing close to optimal, daytime temperatures range from -20 to -25 celcius but the sky is always blue which is a great.

The Journey

During the course of 2009 I had decided that I wanted to go to northern China to learn shaolin martial arts, my goal was to take a break from my daily life and just do more to stimulate my body mind and soul. The ultimate goal was to feel healthy and also if I wasn't going to do this now I never would.

Before leaving I promised friends and family a blog and after about 8 months I have finally taken some time to write out some of the notes I have collected in my diary and share them on the internet. And I know the tenses, spelling, grammar and other parts of the english language are used rather poorly but just accept it and I promise I will include a lot of pictures to make up for the poor writing. Originally I had planned to create a blog as I arrived but somehow this never happened. Firstly because blogger.com isn't accessible without a VPN or proxy connection due to the great chinese firewall. Another reason was that I simply felt too tired from training everyday and preferred just writing by hand compared to typing notes out on my laptop. Either way these are the posts that you have been expecting, luckily blogger has a function to change the post dates. So for example the post "The academy and people" has a date in January so this won't include any events beyond that month.

Anyway I left home (South Africa) on 30 December 2009 and spent 3 days including new years celebrations in Germany with my friend Tammo. Because I had this planned departing and saying farewell from home wasn't as bad I had expected. Only when I was on my flight from Europe to China it struck me and I realised what I had embarked on, truly mixed emotions.

I left Zurich on 3 January at about 13:00 and arrived in Shanghai almost 12 hours later at around 7:10am on 4 January (note the 6 hour time difference, 7 hours from South Africa).

 

 On the runway in Zurich, the point of no return...

The weather in Shanghai was average, about 8 degrees but very misty with poor visibility, the airport was huge, grey and rather depressing. After collection my luggage I bought my ticket to Changchun on Shanghai airlines (which was more difficult than expected, not many people speak english), where my escort would be waiting for me. After a 5 hour wait and a 1 hour delay I finally set off north to Changchun. The snacks on the flight were questionable and I ended up only eating the raisins.

After a 3 hour flight which felt like an eternity the aircraft was finally making it's descent into Changchun. I will never forget this day, because when I looked outside all I could see was white, I have experienced winter in Montreal which is cold however this was on another level. Needless to say the temperature outside was -38 Celsius (-36 Fahrenheit if you're American).

 

Changchun Airport

After collecting my luggage I made my way to the arrivals area to meet up with my escort/driver, I was slightly anxious, excited and nervous but felt at ease when I was greeted by a friendly chubby chinese man.

After about 4 hours of driving through snow and ice at about 40km/h we finally arrived at the academy at around 21:00. When I arrived I was welcomed by two friendly translators called Nelly and Vera. The academy not only houses male and female foreign students but also chinese kids from ages 6-14 years. They showed me my room and gave me some food which was significantly better than I was expecting.

My room wasn't great, it had a bed, a coat rack and two cupboards for my clothes. The room was also freezing but still I was happy because I didn't need to share a room. I couldn't shower because I had arrived after the shower time which is between 19:30 and 20:30.

Before going to bed I made use of the toilets which were quite a shock, luckily there are western toilets not the conventional chinese hole in the floor style toilets. However there are 3 toilets right next to each other with separating walls that are barley 1.5m high. To make things worse there was a rather unpleasant and pungent smell that resembles something like ammonia, not from cleaning agents but rather from stale urine, I guess I won't be doing any reading on toilet like I used to.