Hong Kong (3/1 - 3/3): Boon Docks in HK and Pat's Return to Wushu

When I got out of the Airport Express with my 4 pieces of luggage I decided to just take a taxi straight home and unload all my stuff before heading in to the office. When I got to work Boon was there! For those of you who don't remember, Boon used to work at Design Reactor and Rotten Tomatoes as a designer, and he's moved to Hong Kong to work for AliveNotDead as our Creative Director. It was nice to see a familiar face again. Work was good. It was work -- not much to write about. I stayed later since I got in later, and then went home and crashed. The next day work went pretty normally but the evening was the interesting part. Earlier in the week Pat had found the new location for Li Fai's wushu school, which turned out to be just down the street from our office, about 5 minutes away. But what is REALLY interesting, is that the coach for the wushu classes is none other than Liu Yan from the Beijing Wushu Team. Here are a few photos in case you don't remember who I'm talking about ... Yeah .. he was a little drunk towards the end of that night. Those were taken in the summer of 2005 in Beijing, just a month or two before he left for Hong Kong. Pat had talked with Li Fai about classes. It turns out that they don't have any adult wushu classes -- only kids/teens wushu and adult taiji. But he was persistent and she said that he could drop by the Friday evening class to train and talk to the coach. Of course I wanted to go as well. I didn't actually realize about the training part though until Pat came into the office with his bag of wushu clothes and shoes. Just as well since my left ankle and knee are being problematic this week. We headed over to the school and Pat warmed up while I sat there for a bit. Liu Yan showed up and we chatted with him for a while. The class was fairly standard and the level of the kids/teens in the class was around lower intermediate. I was mainly impressed with Pat. For someone who hasn't trained more than a few times in the last 5 years he did really well. I'm sure it was quite painful for him, but it was still pretty darn good. He did a lot more than I would have my first time back to wushu Li Fai on the left, Liu Yan in the pink Li Fai's Sign Board Patrick stretching with some kids Patrick's back and Liu Yan on the right After class we talked with Liu Yan about classes and pricing and then we talked to Li Fai as well. We're hoping to work something out, but I'll refrain from giving details until we actually know what we're going to be doing. Probably one of the biggest pieces of news is that Liu Yan isn't the only Beijing Team Member teaching at Li Fai's school. I saw a DVD for sale on their counter that had Liu Yan on it .. and I saw another DVD with someone else who looked really familiar. I swore I had seen her before so I asked Liu Yan. It turns out it was (drumroll please .....) Liu Juan! That's right! Blast from the past! But she looks older now and not so much like the little, round-faced wushu girl she used to be. For those of you who don't know who she is, just head to Raffi's website, beijingwushuteam.com, and she's the girl in the title image in the empty stance. After class Pat hobbled to the 7-11 to get a drink and then caught a cab home. I did the same and spent some time in the evening attempting to unpack, but really all I did was watch some "Sliders", copy over a bunch of files between my various hard drives, and then go to sleep. And boy did I sleep. I ended up sleeping over 12 hours. I really, really needed it because I hadn't been getting nearly enough sleep over the past week or so.