Wuwei - Kung Fu Shaolin Stylie!

After a worrying few minutes where we could not wake Petro from his morning-after sleep, somewhere deep inside the Lazy Lizard he eventually emerged and took us straight to the bauzer shop (a Chinese meat-inside doughy pastry delicacy) for breakfast and into the waiting minibus destined for Wuwei Monastery.

No sooner were we there and we were straight into the routine we would be living for the next week, which went a bit like this:

• 05:30 - Get woken-up by inconsiderately loud ringing of a ginormous bell, all of a few metres from our bed. This was followed by nearly an hour and a half of Buddhist chanting. All-in-all good reason to pop in some earplugs in the total darkness and try to get back to sleep in the icy cold morning.
• 07:00 - Morning run to waterfall and run back with a rock on your head, ready to be used in the building of the monastery! (Missed on all occasions due to ear plugs put in at 05:30.)
• 08:00 - Breakfast - eat as much noodle soup as you can - you'll need it later! Occasionally we were lucky enough to get bauzers and rice pudding which totally rocked.
• 08:30 - Wander about aimlessly thinking about doing things like having an icy-cold shower under the tap or make use of the toilets cleaned by mountain dogs which ate the solids. I definitely preferred the ice-cold showers to the stench of the open-sewer toilet - smelling of soap beat smelling the rear-ends of the entire troop of monks and construction workers (who shat on the floor rather than in the sewer), but alas eating high-fibre vegetarian diets requires multiple visits to avoid embarrassing moments.
• 09:00 - 2 hours of warm-ups as follows:
• 15 individual stretches (50 repetitions each)
• 5 back and upper body stretches on a block with you partner stretching you (hold for 50 seconds each)
• 11 individual stress positions (hold and stretch further for as long as you can take it)
• 3 3-person leg stretches (hold then stretch a little further for as long as you can take it)
• 33 basics - repetitions of basic Shaolin evasions and attacks whilst moving down the length of the temple.
• ...by now you feel like you've done plenty and just want food and rest!
• 11:00 - Learn some forms! Martin and I both had one-on-one tuition, learning Shaolin Quan first, after which I went on to learn Eagle and Martin learned Mantis.
• 12:00 - Lunch finally! Eight people sit around a table stocked with a huge bowl of rice, refilled whenever it emptied, a potato and (some) root vegetable soup and an array of smaller, more tasty dishes in short supply, consisting mainly of tofu and mushrooms. Our table almost always finished all our dishes first and sat around chewing on small amounts of rice and soup until the other tables were polite enough to say "Ah mi tofa" (Give me tofu!, or maybe life is suffering) and leave, allowing the raiding of their dishes to commence.
• 12:30 - This is about the only free time during the day when we have enough light to do anything other than sleep. After getting told not to play guitar in my room on day two as it breaks rule 271 - thou shalt not hear music unless it be gongs and chanting, I was reduced to reading or diary writing alone.
• 14:00 - Quickly chomp down a Snickers bar and head for extra individual training if you fancy it. I won't lie and say I did it everyday (its amazing just how much you legs can ache), but it did give us a chance to go through both our Hung Leng Kuen and Shaolin stuff and play with some weapons!
• 16:00 - 1-1/2 hours of warm-ups and basics again, though slightly reduced without the upper-body block stretches.
• 17:30 - A final few minutes to learn a few more movements to your forms...well that is if your brain can take anymore after a massive crash-course in stretches and basics requiring sustained concentration for far longer than the usual two hour stints back home. We tried to cram just that little bit more in though!
• 18:00 - Same deal as lunch, though with the added bonus that the monks need to start they're prayers at 18:30 so the wait for the tables to clear is shorter, though conversely the food on our table disappears more quickly. After they're gone us hawks more in!
• 18:30 - Gongs and chanting...again. Nearly 35 minutes of usable daylight remains, well outside at least. Options amount to take our guitars and go into exile outside the monastery grounds where we can play wrapped in all the cold-weather gear we can find...or keep warm. I played guitar three times which I thought was highly commendable.
• 20:00 - Gongs and chanting finally stop. My room is directly below. Try not to choke on the jostick smoke filled air or the inches of dust which lie in my room whilst trying to keep warm enough to fall asleep, caked in the grease and sweat of the day's training.

After day 1 this is what I thought...

***VIDEO: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-886028843783062491&hl=en ***

Learning to live without electricity wasn't so bad - it just meant you always had plenty of sleep - though quite often your body would be waking you up at 2am if you went to bed at 8pm! Living without showers however was completely wrong - requiring upper-body-only showers under the tap which kept me "smelling so good - better than the girls in face" according to Omer. All it was was soap - and a little dedication!

I'm so glad I'd done some Kung Fu training before going to Wuwei though as there was a definite lack of teaching the application, but from what we could work out and what Omer and Nadav had learned we had a pretty good idea. I think the most notable problem with the school was the lack of teaching by their Shifu. Instead teaching was left up to an 18-year-old called Shimmy, who was good, but at the same time still very young and with no-one to watch over him he didn't have any incentive to correct every little mistake of the younger ones. As a result kids which should have been awesome martial artists were just mediocre.

I don't think I've ever ate so much tofu in my life, well and snickers - though Martin did significantly better me with 24 in just a week!

After having talked and quoted Fat Bastard for nearly a week, Friday evening we headed firstly to a few essential washing duties (ourselves and our clothes) and then back to Stella Pizzeria with Nadav, Omer and two others for a spot of Goldmember! Then followed a Chinese massage and then sleeping all cuddled in electric blankets - definitely a good way to thoroughly relax our bodies after the week we'd had!

***VIDEO: The net results: me doing Eagle: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5133683203939431873&hl=en

***VIDEO: Martin doing Mantis: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5110867192013952387&hl=en