Third week in Wudang [ENG]

Summary

As the Taichi 13 class ended with the end of the second week, the third week I joined (back, as I had already practiced with them the first three days after I had arrived) the other students and I was assigned a Kung fu form, the 伏虎拳 fuhuquan, to learn.

The FuHuQuan

After two weeks of slow-paced basic movements training, joining back the main group with their various collective exercises has proven to be tough. Since my right knee has been hurting for weeks at this point (I didn’t give it too much thought during the Taichi 13 class because of the slow movements), I have been skipping the exercises that involve me extending my right leg abruptly, hoping it will go away soon.
Even so, I had to practice the tiger form, which is a very quick (especially coming from the Taichi 13) and powerful one. I was exhausted after every training, but it is a nice form to practice.

Many interesting things have happened this week.

Visa application & ID photos

On Monday me and some other students went to the local police station to apply for our visa’s extension.
Although we went there early, they told us to come the day after because they were busy cracking down some drug traffic. So, the day after (Tuesday) we went there again, and this time we were able to apply for the visas. Turns out we couldn’t have our ID photos taken at the police station (although some other Chinese people were having theirs taken in front of us), so we briefly headed to town.

I have had ID photos taken countless times before, always at an ID photo booth. Never in my life I would have imagined that there is no ID photo booth in town, so we had to go to a photographer’s shop to have them taken. It has been a very interesting experience: we sat on a chair for 10 seconds, as the shop’s lady took two pictures, which she then imported to the PC and photoshopped super quickly in front of us (now I know what to tweak to look better lol). She then lined them up, printed them, and dried them. It was like watching a personified photo booth machine work.. in real time.

Shishu’s picture

Shishu 师叔, “uncle teacher”, how we call my current coach - the main here - is the title by which anyone who has the same level as the school’s master is called. He’s a quite skinny, but very strong guy. My roommate told me that once he showed them a moment - a fist - and the bracelet he was wearing on that arm just exploded.
Anyway, Tuesday night we were expecting to have a super tough training, as it’s the last night training before the “weekend”. Surprise, maybe because of the number of new students - including me - who had just joined the group, we were made practice the basic forms. Lucky us. After the light training, me and some other foreign students were called by Shishu, and for a little while I feared we’d be given some more practice.
I never could have imagined what was about to happen.

He called a Chinese guy, gave him his phone, and had him wait in front of us.
Then, he started positioning each one of us. He would just walk between us, move someone a little, stop to think, repeat.
When he was satisfied with our positioning, he started posing us. He would think of three different poses for each one of us, and make us copy him until he felt that was the right one. He’d move our hands, fingers, like we were action figures.
After some good 20 minutes, we started shooting the pictures, and they came out pretty well.

One of said pictures

The only regret I have is not asking the Chinese guy with Shishu’s smartphone, who stood there the whole time, to take a making-of video of the whole thing, but other than that it has been a really amusing experience. If you ever wondered what Kung fu masters do after they’ve, well, mastered Kung fu, photography seems to be one of their favorite activities. Maybe I’ll talk more about this in the future.

Some attempts at using Chinese medicine

In the summary I wrote that I injured my right knee. Over the weeks I’ve tried different solutions.
It all started when a middle-aged Chinese guy from my class noticed that I had pain at my knee. He had me come to his room, and sprayed me some liquid medicine he called 药酒 yaojiu. I soon noticed I wasn’t the only one: several other students went to his room to have this medicine sprayed. It was only when I asked where I could buy it that I understood the reason: it’s not sold, he is making it on his own. It didn’t seem to work for my problem though. Some days later, I asked one of the students, who is an acupuncturist, and he recommended me to try moxa. I bought at the school’s shop one of these big boxes of cigar-shaped sticks and tried using it on my knee and right leg. The usage is pretty simple: you light it on one side, and keep it close to specific points on the leg until the skin turns red, usually for 10 minutes or so.
The first day it felt like it worked, but the next two days the effect seemed to have vanished.


In week 4 I will talk about acupuncture and the other remedies I tried.