KUNG-FU!

This makes the third morning in a row that my breakfast was pizza and apple juice. What?! XD After this meal if you will, I headed off to University Mandarin classes. I finished the homework load and studied quite a bit but failed to fully deliver on the quiz today. It so happens I studied the wrong way that the quiz required but thankfully it was enough to pass.

The lesson today was really hard for me. We learned a different system to teach Chinese which unfortunately is not easy at all for me. I learn Chinese through something called "Pinyin" which was the romanization way the university classes started with. Now the teacher is also bringing in "Mandarin Phonetic Symbols." MPS has different symbols for each sound and can very confusing to me. So I didn't learn any Chinese today, just gain a sore brain from this system. Hopefully I'll get the gist of it soon but it's soooooo not a cake walk for me, especially when I had an evil, painful stomach ache the entire lesson.

Lunch was spent at university with the same buffet line as Monday. I now get to add another food to my craving list. This vegetable is like a clutter of long mushrooms with tiny bulbs that are linked at the bottom which is hard to separate. Yo...quiero...un...camera! Another part of the meal was some pieces of sauced up chicken. It reminded me a lot of the Asian chicken you get in frozen packages at the store. Made me happy to nom-nom on some as it was my first time to eat it's type in Taiwan and I missed it.

With only minutes to spare I made it to nap time! Exchange students at my school aren't required to come before 1:00 but I always do just to attend the lovely oozy-snoozy class. Though I've been recovering nicely from the sickness, I'm still very tired and need the siesta.

The high school classes today were just Math and Chinese. Math was spent trying to remember the material from years ago and Chinese was memorizing the MPS system of confusion. What followed after was the real HIGHLIGHT! CHINESE MARTIAL ART CLUB!!! OH MY GOSH IT WAS AWESOME!! There were about 22 students, mostly boys but as planned invaded by chicas! Other than the female exchange students (4 total), there was one new girl and two club leaders. So we're not alone in gender. :P Moving on, we had one master and two helpers who trained under this same master. All of them were very welcoming and nice to us new students. Commencing the meeting, we did numerous stretches and warm up routines. Some were extremely interesting like walking forward with your arms spread out like an eagle while kicking your feet up to touch your hands. If I could've filmed myself, I bet I would look like a total noob failure. XD But it was SO MUCH FUN!!! Great workout too! The other part of the lesson was learning a routine that included some preying mantis style moves. Yes, this club is authentic Chinese marital arts! Heck my teacher is an authentic Chinese! This is the real deal and makes me so pumped! Thinking about how I'm learning this ancient culture art, it motivates me to give more energy in my movements, bend my knees a little more and all around savor every minute!

Want to know how the last part of the club went? It involved the master and the students interacting. This interaction was basically the master telling us to hit him and proceeding to whip out a can of Chinese butt whooping! Anywhere from knocking our feet from the ground to throwing a guy over his shoulder. Don't worry, the dude wasn't here from the launching! He just got a little dirty from the floor. :P Oh yeah, our club was located in the back BACK of the school campus in a somewhat wide alley with rough gravel. So no air conditioning but that didn't matter much because we had the shade of a building and everyone was sweating up a storm anyway. XD

More on the master showing us some moves, he performed taking advantage of pressure points as he gripped my hand and later neck. After applying pressure he would ask, "Pain?" At first I replied, "uh...a little." (in Chinese of course!) The master went "oh," and tried again. He did in fact find the pressure point I'll say that. XD I think at first he was hesitate to perform moves on the exchange students but that cleared up when he came to me. I put up a bit of a fight when he tried to kick out my legs so I think I flagged him a "it's ok to make me your rag doll" message. About 5-10 times he would use his martial arts on me and all of them were so fascinating! The way he can control his opponents body to gain the upper hand is astounding! One moment I'm throwing a punch at him, the next movement I'm kneeling on the ground with my arms in a painful locked position. He showed us so many moves but were very hard to study because he was so fast. I think he was just demonstrating today instead of teaching such things. The routine we did learn is something I've been practicing at home and intend to get it down pat! *cough*maybe a video later if I have a working camera*cough* Though I'm not positive if we were shown the entire routine or not, I will find out next Thursday! I AM SO STAYING IN THIS CLUB! THIS IS AMAZING!!! I kinda wonder if I can do more of it outside of the club but I really don't know. Andrea is just loving today's meeting way too much. :P

Kung-Fu Taffy fin!