Since Monday the 22nd the Wing Chun class has gone from 23 people in the class to 12. A lot of people left during the past couple weeks. There was a time a few weeks ago that there were too many people in the small wing chun hall that we had to line up outside the hall. Training has gone very well this week. Master Guo has been watching us closer now since he has a smaller group. There are Pros and Cons to this situation. PROS: Master Guo is in a happier mood. I guess there is less stress dealing with fewer students. Now Master Guo can help correct us more. Master Guo even has time to explain the origins of a few techniques we learned. Oh and the time we have to hold the splits is less since he has fewer people to walk around pulling legs out. AWESOME!
CONS: We have to do extra drills since we are not waiting for the extra 11 others to finish. Master Guo comes around more often during conditioning to check if we are doing it correct, if not he "helps". If we slack during class we get kicked more. For example. On Tuesday the 23rd we had to do Stance Training. Since there are less people, he was able to keep an eye on ALL of us. If we were not low enough, legs weren’t straight enough, or hands weren’t high enough he would whip us with a branch he broke off from a nearby tree. He had to keep getting new branches because he kept breaking them on Raven.
A side note about Raven. Raven is 15 years old and is serving a five year sentence here. Well his parents sent him here for five years. They had sent him to Military School because he was too bad to be in regular school, but even the military school kicked him out. He has been here one year, and hopes to open his own Kung Fu school when he graduates, (gets paroled?) As you might tell from my blogs, Raven gets beat often. For example, he will sleep in and miss the morning run so Master makes him do 20 frog jumps or just whips him four times. Believe it or not, I think Raven is one of Master’s favorite students.
Back to this Monday. My roommate Ben left to go back to France. He was a great roommate. But as soon as he left, Sam moved in the same day. Time to start making new adventure stories with the ol’ roommates back together right?
Well Monday night was Kendra, a classmate who is from the States, was leaving the Academy. (Even though I have friends here from all around the world, I feel a little closer to other students who are from the USA. Anyway, a few friends and i convinced her to have a going away dinner so she told everyone she agreed to go to the restaurant down the road tonight. Turns out 17 people wanted to join us. The rooms down at the restaurant could fit 7 people... but i told her we will see what we can do.
We all walked down to the restaurant. The lobby was small so i told everyone wait outside while I talked to the owner. I went inside and the guy knows me since I, come here a lot with jake, and ash on weekends. i told him in Chinese that we have 17 people and if that was ok. He told me we would have to split into separate rooms. i went back outside and told the crew what the plan was. They agreed to go into two rooms. Before we went in the waiter told me to look at this room in the back. It was a big room and looked like it could fit another table. We ended up getting another table and fitting all 17 people in one room.
The hard part wasn’t over yet. Everyone wanted to see the menu but there was only 1 in English. So after a lot of yelling and a few people snatching the menu from one another (Kung Fu students fighting over one menu…. They could destroy the restaurant) I got the menu and stood up and got everyone's attention. i told everyone what was on the menu then i asked who wanted rice. 12 people, i told the waiter in Chinese 12 people, then i said who wanted noodles, then i told the waiter. I got a few dishes per table and i said we will start off with that. If anyone wanted something else wen all the food got here then they can but for now we had about 6 main dishes per table already. Kendra shot me a ‘Thank you’ look and the evening went smooth from there. Everyone was satisfied and was too full to order anything else. My job was not over yet...had to pay. I hunted down our waiter and told him we wanted the check. Everyone except Kendra chipped in equal for the food. Finally when we paid, my job was done!
Everyone got back to the academy and a few of us ended up watching a movie before bed. It was a nice last night for Kendra. I thought to myself, it will be extremely horrible when i have to try to coordinate my ‘last night party’ here. But that’s about 4 and a half months from now. Till that day, more adventures to go.
-Scott
-Scott
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