Beijing - Day 5 (12/4): Rest, Wushu and Wu Di

I’ve been dealing with this mild cold for the last few days. When I’m sick I generally have a harder time sleeping and tend to wake up more during the night and get up early even though I’m tired. So today I worked hard to sleep in as much as possible and managed to get a full 10 hours of sleep. I was pretty happy about that.

As soon as I woke up I got to work on Wu Di’s music video that I needed to finish up to give to him in the evening. I pretty much worked on it straight through the day, with a small break for lunch downstairs on the 2nd floor, until I have to leave for wushu at 3:30.  (I tried uploading the video to youtube but the connection froze up so I’ll have to do it another time.  Sorry for the delay.)

The class went pretty well. We kind of start late so there isn’t much time to practice. It’s supposed to start at 4:00, but people don’t even show up sometimes until 4:30. Then it takes then about 30 minutes to roll out the carpets, individually warm up, and by then it’s 5:00 and we only have an hour of class left. So by around 5:15 or 5:20 we start doing forms and since the coach was angry with one of the athletes today he pushed us a little harder than Friday. Whereas last Friday it took us about 45 minutes to make it through a rotation of 5 sections, today we pumped out all 8 sections in about 25 minutes. I had to sit out the 7th because I was too tired, but managed to make i through all the others, for which I was pretty happy.

After class I walked out to the front gate and grabbed a cab for Shi Cha Hai. It was sort of weird being there since I haven’t been there in 6 months and after what happened in the summer, I wasn’t sure I would ever really see it again. But I managed to do okay. I went to Wu Di’s room and showed him the video. He seemed to like it. Then we went over to the hotel side of the building and visited some of the National Team members who were training there.

So, to clarify, this is why there are currently two places where the National Team is training. The group at Shi Cha Hai is specifically training for Doha, Katar and the Asian Games which just started up. They will leave on the 7th for Doha and come back a week or two later. Then from Beijing they will fly down to Fuzhou to join the rest of the Chinese National Team training group. Wu Di speculated that the group in Fuzhou was there more to train for the upcoming World Games (and subsequent qualifications for the games held in conjunction with the 2008 Olympics).

In any case, the first room we visited had Ma Ling Juan (Anhui), Yuan Xiao Chao (Shanxi) and Wu Ya Nan (Shaanxi) hanging out. Wu Di dropped some stuff off for them (spear tassle for Ma Ling Juan, DVD for someone else, blah blah blah) and we showed them the video I made for him. Then Yuan Xiao Chao took us down the hall to Wu Cai Bao’s (Guangdong) room to chill for a bit. Wu Di dropped some disk off for him and they chatted for a bit. Amazingly Wu Cai Bao actually remembered me from the 2 seconds I happened to be near him in Zhengzhou in October. I think it was at the Shaolin Temple Super Spectacular Performance thingee when I asked them if some of the English wushu folks could take a picture with them. So I guess Wu Cai Bao might have asked Xie Fu Yan or Zhao Qing Jian who I was or something. In any case, I was pretty flattered he remembered me at all, considering we’ve never spoken to each other.

After that Wu Di and I headed out and caught a taxi for the sushi place all us Shi Cha Hai foreigners would go to with Wu Di over the summer. Of course, the food was quite good, and it was all you can eat for 80 RMB per person. Not bad … all you can eat Japanese (edible) food for $10 USD. We hung out there for a couple hours and chatted a long time. Eventually he had to get going so he went back to Shi Cha Hai and I caught a cab to go down the street to my hotel where I updated my blog and did some re-packing before going to bed.

Wu Di Loves Sushi

Tomorrow I’m going to go watch the Beijing and National teams training at Shi Cha Hai (assuming I don’t get blocked at the door by the foreign services department, of course) so I’m looking forward to that. But it means I have to wake up at like 7:30 or 8:00 so I can’t stay up too late tonight.

Having said that… goodbye!