Beijing – Day 21: Goodbye ShiChaHai, Hello Kent

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 to this entry

And our last day of training had arrived. At the last moment our location changed from the Multi-Purpose Hall to the upstairs wushu hall, so we got to train up with the professionals. Liu Qing Hua’s group was there training, as were a few others such as Liu Xiao Lei and Wang Xi.

We had a good practice, although I spent a fair amount of time trying to get photos and videos of the professional training. I hadn’t really spent much time doing that during this trip so far, but wanted to at least capture what I could while I was able.

Coach Liu

Korean Nanquan Guy

Xiao Lan

Wu Di

Liu Qing Hua

Shahaub

Unfortunately, the Middle Kingdom has prevented me from accessing my usual format for uploading images and what not to my blog. So, I am going to have to come back and re-edit these blogs later with all the photos once I am back in the U.S. I read somewhere that once National Day has come and gone, that all of the usual sites will be viewable again. This is the 60th Anniversary of the PRC, which is a pretty big deal here in China. I’m sure it will be quite exciting. In fact, I will be back in China then, so I’ll try to blog a bit about it, time permitting.

After practice we all had to check out of our rooms. We stuck the stuff we weren’t taking with us to Zhengzhou and Xi’an in a storage room, and the rest of our thing we put in Patti’s room, which she had arranged a late check-out for. The afternoon was ours to enjoy as we liked.

I took Pierre and Jennifer across the street to the bing restaurant, and they seemed to enjoy the authenticity of the food there. After that I visited Shahaub’s room and then took my cameras to the wushu hall to capture some more of the training. After the practice I was even able to learn the 3rd section of Xie Zhen Hao’s nanquan form and record him walking through the other sections too. I’m very excited to integrate some of his techniques into my form, although it is going to take quite a bit of thought on the best ways to do it.

Here are some cool pictures of Xie Zhen Hao doing his thing:

Xie Zhen Hao

For the other Wushu West folks, most of them spent the day either going to Ya Xiu for some shopping, or hanging out at the hotel playing around and taking naps.

But soon it was time for us to head out. Our tour-guide for the trip was Kent, from Shanghai. It was really nice to have someone besides me, Patti or whomever to be in charge of the group for a change. I happily gave up stressing over whether everyone was in our group and just tried to enjoy the trip.

But I’m going to save the first leg of our trip to Zhengzhou for the next blog. In the meantime, I can upload this one photo for you to view until I am able to incorporate the rest of them here:

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