Jinan - Day 5 (11.17): Wushu Testing and Lots of Walking

2006.11.17 - 21:15

china. shandong. jinan - hotel room

Even with the extreme length of these entries (and if you actually make it to the end of them, kudos to you!) I still managed to forget to write up a few things each day.

Yesterday Lu Laoshi was back. I saw him riding his scooter (which made me miss my own scooter) on my way to film the class yesterday and he said he came back early from [indistinguishable name of where he was off to].

Anyway, this morning proceeded as per the norm. I woke up at 6:30 (ugh), showered, at a quick bite and then went to wushu. Today’s class was brought to me by the letter “A” … which stands for “Awesome”. But it wasn’t awesome because of anything I did. It was awesome because there was a nandu and forms test for some of the athletes and I got to film it.

The beginning of class went as usual.
Ding Hai Juan was back today so there were 6 girls and me doing the “throw up the ball and call a number” game. I get put with the girl’s in their games because (1) they plan on the thicker carpet and the coach thinks (rightfully so) that I have bad leg joints and (2) they make me. Apparently the guys couldn’t give a flying fig either way but the girls seem to enjoy making me run after a big rubber ball. This time I actually ended up having to sing, so I did the chorus from Billy Joel’s “Honesty”, which is the only song I could think of at the time (aside from the requested Richard Marx classic “Right Here Waiting”, which I couldn’t recall when put on the spot.). All this time the guys were playing some variation on wushu tag around us which made catching and throwing the big rubber ball that much harder.

After the game was basics and I was happy that I managed to make it through all of them. In the middle of basics all the afternoon wushu kids showed up and sat down on the green carpet near the door. Then, while they were doing jumps and I was doing my wall sits Li De Hua called the athletes over and told them to just do their own thing on the side and that a few of them would be participating in the testing.

The testing was set up on the far light blue carpet. Yang Laoshi (Shandong Team head coach) and the Women’s coach (some guy who’s name I never remember) sat at a table on the far green carpet and tested the athletes on a variety of nandu technique and then they each had to do a whole form or two.

Zhang Ling and another athlete watching the testing

Before this all happened I asked Zhang Ling if it was okay for me to film the testing with my digital camera. She said it was and I was happy. I managed to get all the nandu and one of each person’s form before my battery died. Wouldn’t you know it? The one day I don’t bring my spare battery and I’m able to film all this wushu. I didn’t mind though. I got some good stuff and finally got some of Cao Jing’s wushu on video. It definitely made up for the previous day’s lack of taolu footage.

After class I walked out with Ding Hai Juan and Yuan Feng Ling and we chatted until they got to where they were going. I went and got my meat bings and headed back to my hotel.

I decided to do something for the team/coaches so I took all my footage and edited it together. Each athlete grouped together, with each of their nandu repeated in slow motion followed by their form, all burned on to a VCD so they could analyze each athletes strengths and weaknesses. However, after spending most of the afternoon doing this I realized that I had mistakenly not brought a spool of DVDs and a spool of VCDs as I had thought, but instead had brought two spools of DVDs. Whoops.

So, at around 5:00 I started getting hungry and headed out to get another meat bing (hey! they’re good!). This time the meat bing lady talked to me for a bit. “Where are you from?” “America.” “Really? Why can you speak such good Chinese?”It is kinda flattering though ...

Bing Cakes in the Making, from conception, to cooking to delivery.

In any case, I grabbed a cab and decided to go to the Computer store next to Walmart and grab some blank CDs to burn the VCDs. I couldn’t remember the name of the place so I just asked the taxi driver to take me to the place with all the computer equipment that was straight down the main street. He ended up taking me to one that was much closer. Fortunate for me, they were about to close so I ran inside and got a spool of 50 CDs and some disk holders for about 50 rmb or so. The insides of these places are all pretty much the same setup so it wasn’t hard to find what I was looking for.

Now, as it turns out, this was about 10 minutes to 6:00. In Jinan, when you’re on the main street, it’s quite hard to get a cab at 6:00 p.m. But to be honest, I didn’t mind. I decided I would go for a walk.

And boy did I walk. I kept heading down the main street towards downtown. I kept walking .. and walking .. and walking. And the thing is that when you walk through a neighborhood (or six) you see a lot more of it than you would in a taxi. I found an alleyway with dozens of interesting food stalls that you’d never see if you were in a car. I saw all sorts of people and random businesses along the road that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. I decided that I would just walk until I got tired, but it would seem that my endurance is improving because about an hour ino the walk I was still okay. I ended up walking from Shan Da Lu (wherever that is) all the way down to the Crown Plaza Hotel, which is just around the corner from the Street Market I went to the other day (and visited with Jenn and Wang Wei last year). I passed Shan Li Lu … I passed the famous “ West Drink Town” (home of the best Chinese Michael Jackson impersonator this side of the Yellow River) … I passed the hospital, the Shandong International Hotel, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

One of the many happy faces I encountered on my walk.

I did take a little stop at one point and sat on a stool to cool off, but by that point I was only about 100 meters from the Street Market anyway. I also made a quick trip to KFC and grabbed a chicken sanwich and a drink. By the time I had finished my walking it was around 7:15 or so. To be honest, I can’t really remember the last time I walked for over an hour. It might have been at the Shaolin Temple, but I was stopping and panting and puffing the whole way then so this is definitely an improvement.

Coming back to the hotel I measured the distance I had travelled and compared it to the distance from the Electornics store back to the hotel. I actually walked much farther than that distance so I could have conceivable just walked back to the hotel from where I was. However, I don’t think that would have been quite as much fun.

When I got back to I found that the hotel does not wash socks or underwear as part of it’s laundry service. There was a bag of my dirty undergarments in my bathroom when I got back. I would have to wash them by hand, which I wasn’t adverse to doing. (Fortunately I brought more than enough underwear and socks just in case something like this happens.

And then I got to work on burning the VCDs and writing my blog. And here it was only 8:00 p.m. too. The night was almost still young. By the time I finished writing this entry it was just around a quarter past nine. Plenty of time for me to get a real night’s sleep and wake up ready for the last day of wushu for this week. I’m looking forward to giving the VCDs to the coaches and seeing what they think of them. I might bring my laptop with me too, just to show them. (Times like this I wish I had brought my portable DVD player with me.