Beijing – Day 19/20: The Final Blur

This blog entry is being written for Wushu West’s website, wushuwest.com. However, since I’m the one writing it, I thought it might be of interest to other folks too. If you would like to learn more, please visit the Wushu West website.

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EDIT: 7/28: Added photos from wushu practice

To be honest, it feels like a long time ago that we were in Beijing, even though it was technically only 3 days. I’m going to do a very quick summary of the last couple days. Unfortunately I didn’t get any photos of Sunday and Monday, so you will have to do with this hastily-written entry. I really have so much stuff from the trip to Zhengzhou (Shaolin Temple) and Xi’an that I want to get to that as quickly as possible.

Sunday

It was our day off. As such, a lot of us had various things we wanted to accomplish before leaving Beijing on Tuesday. A lot of that involved going to Ya Xiu. For myself, I first had a nice lunch over at Patti’s home with a few of her family and some of the Wushu folks who were able to make it. It was a quick bite and after watching some strange sports on CCTV5, Ruhi and I headed to Ya Xiu.

bbq-ing

the spread

patti’s brother

really hard to eat food

The main task at hand was to figure out our wedding clothes. Coincidentally we also ended up running into Lauren, Ashley, Susan, James, Myles, Jennifer, Wu Di, Pierre and Shahaub there.

After shopping 6 of us headed back to the Singaporean restaurant from Friday night and we all had some great food. It was amazing to watch Wu Di when he’s hungry. A few of us almost lost some fingers. Then it was a taxi ride back to Shi Cha Hai and an evening relaxing and preparing for our last full day of workout.

Monday

Originally we had been told that the morning workout was at 8:00. So naturally we were all up nice and early. But then it turned out it was switched to 10:00, so we had to wait a couple hours. Poor Tyler actually went to the wushu guan. But we finally got situated and then worked out downstairs in the lower wushu hall. For myself, I was creating a Tiger form, so I made the first two sections of that. So far, so good. After class we also had a group meeting about our upcoming departure from Beijing.

lauren and patti

group meeting

After workout we didn’t have a ton of time to do things before our afternoon class. I went across the street with Ruhi to grab some bing from the restaurant I ate at back in 2004 or 2005 with Patti and her brother. It was still there and still delicious.

Afternoon practice was in the upstairs wushu hall. It was pretty empty as we were the only ones in the whole room. I spent some time figuring out my form and teaching Travis a few moves from my nanquan (Southern Fist) form. Ruhi had gone by that time, as she had a dinner appointment and was flying back to Xi’an on Tuesday morning.

Most of us spent the rest of the evening packing and preparing for our trip. Pierre and I also received a visit from Wu Di and Shahaub, along with Jennifer. After a while it was time for bed. zzzzzzzz.

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