Drinks at the Pen

After Sunday training, which was working on a nice technique for opening up a guard and then some form work, I managed to catch up with M at the Pen. It is good to know bar people... I also happened to come across my SCA household, Quinteria, (ender long story here about what Quinteria is within the bla, bla who really wants to know). So needless to say, my friends in garb were surprised to see me and there was much fun catching up.
The result on this is that I have now got people willing to come out to my place and have a yurt making session! Yea, my misery will have company, not to mention help! There is something magical to having a yurt however. It is a portable house with an instant sense of history. There are somewhere pictures of my yurt n its full glory but I don't know where they are. For a guide, my yurt is 6m across and 3m high in the center, it has a green canvas roof and will have a red gum door frame. Inside there is space to safely have a fire and separate areas for dining, sleeping and relaxing. Not bad for a fancy tent!

Wine and Cheese

Saturday night was Styley's wine and cheese night and what a night it was. There was a heap of people there (for the space) which was great! Lots of whine and cheese and even a 4 shiraz tasting comp, aim, guessing the price order of four bottles of wine. We were told that the prices were about $5, $10, $15 and $20. It was an interesting result, all but one put the most expensive wine as the worst. It may have been that it was the youngest, and was meant to be cellared, it may have been because it was over priced. The one person who got the more correct order of anyone else had never drunk wine before, also interesting.
Another interesting point of the evening was it was the first time I had been in the same place with Xiao Ma in social company, it was painful... The worst thing was she acted the same as she always had, but I wasn't in the same place... so when she was casually flirting with other people, I was slowly/inwardly, going insane. We talked the next day, I got a lot of things out, we still get on, I am still not happy... The party was great however, and there are pics avail at here

星期六的课 and soccer.

This lesson was preceded by gong into town to buy mu Chinese tutor soccer boots! At the request of his uncle, we were going into town to buy soccer boots and clothes with $100. It didn't make too much sense to either of us as I have posted under the title Soccer all the times that he has played in the last ten years! If you check the logs his boots haven't caused any problems at all! Anyway we went and boots and ball were bought though no clothes as they were too expensive on our budget. This meant that when we went to training we had a brand new soccer ball and boots to trial. It was the first time in about 4 years that I have kicked such an object and nothing much has changed, after half an hour I am still good to kick on but my partners are tired of running.
So once warmed up with ball kicking, students started to arrive. Most of the lesson was devoted to forms and their brake down. The focus of this was on loading up a punch to be powered by the legs. I did this by pairing off people and getting one to push (punch) and one to resist. The pusher took a cat stance as low as possible allowing their weight to be carried by their standing leg only. The resister would then smother the pushing hand of their partner and apply as much force as necessary/possible to help their partner direct their force, up, out, and under their partners center of gravity.
I then put this into a technique/response to a left right boxers attack.
Many spills and thrills were had.

A dinner with a difference!

Friday night I took out two of my tutors. One of the BeiJing JingCha and my Engineering student tutor. It was an interesting dinner. We went to Lisboa in Woden, it was interesting to see two Chinese people eat dips and bread. Not the normal fare on the mainland of China! I decided to order the dips because after 10 minutes of explanation I couldn't get across exactly what hummus was. They don't teach abut chick peas in professional English at university in China it seems. For dinner we had a series of starters, mostly finger food as it covered the greatest number of categories of "food never before seen". I then learned that Chinese don't usually eat with their fingers in fact it can make them quite uncomfortable, though not so bad they chose to starve.
While we ate there was the usual conversation about this and that, only all in Chinese! Of what I could hear however I was able to understand about %60! I was chuffed. This was mostly because the get to know you chit chat is a large focus of what I have learned all semester. It was good to know that I have learned a useful set of vocab!

Monkey King!

Thursday night I found myself at a loss. I had three and a half hours till the start of class and I didn't want to go home and waste a heap of petrol. So I ended up going to see Hou at the Cha Guan. It was good, though as seems to be usual he was on his way out. This time he was going to the Asian Book-room to serve tea at a book reading of the Monkey King. (the text that became a tv series ages ago). Though I hadn't read the book I enjoyed myself greatly. I was able to contribute due to my Chinese philosophy teaching through martial arts and my knowledge of the series shown on the ABC. The only problem was that the reading/reviewing went on for a couple of hours longer than I thought it would, and I had promised dinner to Hou to go through some of what has been going onto me the past couple of weeks.
This meant that I basically missed training. I wasn't happy about this but there are certain people who need to know what is going on with me for my benefit so when I get a chance to tell them I feel it is prudent to do so.
Over dinner (jellyfish, followed by fried jiaozi and shang tung chicken then Singaporean fish) we chatted about out plans for the future, looking at food, tea, industrial materials and other things. It was good to catch up properly. The upshot of this meeting is a tea tasting scheduled for the 7th of July! It will be good. I am going to Sydney next weekend and will also be able to get some more tea stuff in then.

星期三的课

Suprise!
On arriving at training I was greeted by a very familiar face, 阿蛇 was standing at the gate to welcome me. He is my senior student that I haven't seen in a while because of life issues that kept him away and then he suffered an attack of cognitive dissentience that made training impossible for him to continue until his circumstances changed. I don't know if they have yet changed enough but having him turn up at the hall was a good sign if ever I saw one. He stayed for tea and left when I started class, but it was good to see him again.
I used this lesson to expand some of the material taught in the course into different applications and principles. Alternative ways to get to some of the same points, using some of the principles frequently taught by the Shifu Dave of BFD at the yearly multy style camp, organized by Bai Long Zai Xia and Shifu Dave.

How cool is this guy!

I have recently started listening to a lot of Ben Kweller, and I came across this clip about 5 minutes ago.


When was the last time you saw a performer walking through an audience because there wasn't a sufficient stage?