Jinan - Day 4 (11.16): Filming Wushu and Tech Gunk

2006.11.16 - 22:10

china. shandong. jinan - hotel room

I managed to drag myself out of bed and into the shower this morning. For some reason the hot water isn’t as hot these past 2 days as it was when I first got here. Hopefully it’s a temporary thing. Also, it turns out that, while they were quite yummy, the dumplings didn’t quite agree with me. I think it was actually the horrendous quantities of garlic and vinegar they use in the dipping sauce. It actually burned my lips a bit when I used it. I’m surprised there was an acid hole burned in the bottom of the sauce bowl. It’s almost 20 hours later and I can still taste the garlic in my mouth and no amount of toothbrushing or mouthwashing seems to help. Ah well, lesson learned.

I also tried to FTP the files to my server again, but I’m beginning to think it’s something wrong with my connection. I’m going to have to try to figure out something with the hotel’s broadband instead of my wireless modem, because it doesn’t seem to be working so well.

Class was good. We started off with the usual joint warm-up and jogging around, but after that I got paired with the girls for some games. The first was a strange tag-style game where you run around on lines and can only go one way. The carpet is divided up into a 3 by 3 grid and you try to run away from the “it” person. It remineded me of that arcade game that has a “Q” (I think) in the title where you have to cordon off various parts of the screen while avoiding the sparks that travel along the lines. (Anyone? anyone? Lumberjack? Do you remember this game?) … or possibly light cycles too.

After that we played the “toss the ball in the air and call out someone’s number” game. They played it with one of those huge inflatable yoga balls and if you messed up 3 times you had to sing a song for everyone. Fortunately I was saved this misfortune.

Then it was stretching on the bars and on the carpet followed by group basics.
Li De Hua paired up both of his groups (men and women) together and we did basics as a group. My ankles were feeling better but I still had to keep out of a few of the lines just to be on the safe (and possibly lazy) side. During jumps I did my 45 degree wall sits (I’m told they’re better for my knees) for 6 minutes followed by a 1 minute horse stance and some more stretching until forms.

Athletes going through rotations on the carpet

I worked on nandao today. But my left knee was bugging me a bit so I mostly walked through my old individual form trying to remember the movements. I got a “hen shuai!” (”tottemo kakkoii!” (”very cool!”)) from Li De Hua on my finishing move in the form, which was both embarassing and ego-boosting. He also asked me how long I had been studying nanquan and had some nice things to say about my wushu. I think it boiled down to “You have a good feel for nanquan and you display some “gong fu” (i.e. “high level skill”) when you train”. Again, both embarassing and ego-boosting.

I asked him if it was possible to come during the afternoon class to video tape the team’s practice and he said it was fine and followed with a “are you going to train too?” and I said “No, I only train once a day” to which he answered “why?”. I explained that I’ve only been back at wushu for a month and if I try to do twice a day I’ll injure myself (I’m practically there with just once a day as it is) and said that after a few more months I could probably bump it up to twice a day. I told him that the next time I visit I’ll come twice a day (which means that I’ve both obligated myself to visit again in a few months, and also to experience some serious pain upon my next visit).

Even with my explanation though, I still have the feeling he thought I was a cop out. Ah well .. can’t win them all.

During class I spoke more with some of the girls in my group (and realized that the guys must be super shy because they don’t even give me the time of day).
Yuan Feng Ling and I talked about various things (she’s been doing wushu 9 years, she’s 20 years old, she lives in such-and-such building, blah blah blah ) while she was doing some knee strengthening exercises.

A tired Yuan Feng Ling on the carpet

I also found out that, like a whole ton of other athletes out there, Cao Jing is also going to fuzhou for the China National Team training next month. That makes about 8 people I know who are going there which leads me to theorize (i.e. speculate with no proof whatsoever) that the Team Coaches are calling pretty much everyone they can think of that might be good to have on the team down to Fuzhou so they can weed through them and determine the absolutely best group to send to Qatar for the Asian Games. I’m guessing they will go through a few rounds of elimination to get to the best core group of athletes for this particular competition. Of course … like I said … this is totally speculation. But it seems reasonable to me.

After class I was on the carpet stretching and started talking to some of the other girls. Two of their names I learned. One is Li Chun. She is 16 and has studied wushu for 5 years. Her changquan is pretty good. The other is Zhang Ling and she is (i’m guessing) around 18 or 19. She does straightsword. Those two, along with two other girls were asking me lots of questions. “Where have you been in China?” “Are American women prettier or Chinese women prettier?” “Are American women very fashionable?” “Don’t they use more makeup in America?” You know … all the topics I’m a total expert on.

And for some reason they thought I was 23 years old. I was very flattered, but I’m owing that to the fact that they’re still teenagers and perhaps can’t determine people’s ages so well yet. When I told them I was almost 37 I could have sworn it looked like I had just told them there was no Easter Bunny. Of course they also asked me questions about who I work for, but I’ve learned to just answer the questions people ask (within reason, of course) and eventually they run out of questions to ask and get tired of it. To be honest, everyone asks pretty much the same questions anyway so I already have answers for whatever someone might think of to ask me.

I managed to snap pictures during the morning practice so I’m able to post more of them up in this entry. I hope you enjoy them. Here are a couple of the girls I was chatting with at the end of class.

Chatty Girls from the Shandong Wushu Team

After class I walked across the street and got my 0.5 RMB meat bing for lunch and came back to my room to update my blog and try the FTP again. Unfortunately the FTP didn’t work so I was out of luck as far as that goes. After a shower and some IMing I got my filming gear together and made my way back to the wushu guan at around 2:00 (picking up another 0.5 RMB meat bing on the way — I was still hungry).

Wouldn’t you know it? The one time I went specifically to go film the workout and nothing went my way. First of all, the women’s team wasn’t training there today. So, no Cao Jing’s craziness on film. Second, Li De Hua’s group was pretty much just doing conditioning in the afternoon. (Part of me — the paranoid part — thinks he did that on purpose so that I wouldn’t tape his student’s forms. But like I said — that’s just paranoia.) I did manage to get some good basics footage and some footage of the kid’s group working out, but mostly I just got a lot of good photos. Photos are nice though. I like photos.

Nice drop stance!

But even though I had permission to film there, I still felt like I was intruding a little bit. I’ll probably hold off filming their workouts again for the time being. To be honest, I had a specific purpose in doing it. I was planning on putting together a VCD compilation of their workout along with a music video of their stuff and give it to them as a present as I was leaving Jinan. I can still do that, and some of the footage I have will still work for that. It just would have been neat to have their forms in it too.

Some of the girls stretching out

After the filming I came back to the hotel. It was only 5:00 and the restaurant wouldn’t be open for another 30 minutes so I asked the lady at the front desk about how to get my internet hooked up. Boy did that open a can of worms. The whole thing was quite an ordeal. First I had someone come by with a piece of paper with the I.P. and DNS information for their network. But that didn’t work. Then she gave me some other numbers, but those didn’t work either. Then she was on the phone with “tech support” (some friend of hers) but they couldn’t do anything over the phone so we ended up taking my laptop to the office building next door and going up to the fourth floor.

It turns out there is a little office up there where a group of (geeky) guys and gals run a computer tech company. It reminded me of early gamers.com and Design Reactor days, except way more cramped. My guess is that they had helped the hotel set up internet and wired all the rooms and networked them together. My other guess is that I was the first person who had ever needed to use it because it seemed like they weren’t really experienced at getting hotel guests online.

What they ended up doing is setting up a VPN on my system so that I could access the internet. As a result I was able to access the web much faster than my wireless modem. But unfortunately they hadn’t opened the ports I would need to FTP my files to my server so I was still in the same place I was before, the only difference now was that I could complain it on my blog much faster. It’s the first hotel I’ve been in where they don’t let you FTP. I think it’s just Network Admins being super paranoid about security breaches on their system (as they tend to do). The guy installing the VPN deleted a bunch of the history from my system of how he accessed his network. (As if his network is something I really have any interest in?)

In the end it was Qing to the rescue. He’s up in Beijing working for Google right now and helped me out. I sent the file to him and gave him my FTP info and he uploaded the file for me. You can now see the site at visittetonvalley.com. Yay for technology.

After that was finished it was about 7:00 p.m. I was fammished. I went down to the restaurant and got a pork dish and some cucumber side plate. Not too bad but a bit pricey and probably not the best thing on the menu. 32 RMB ($4). Nothing to write home about.

I decided to go out for a walk after dinner and get some drinks to stock in my room. While I was out I realized that there was a plethera of food available on the street that looked pretty darn good and was probably super cheap too. The next day I would go out for my dinner instead of eating at the restaurant. Variety is the spice of life, right?

I walked all the way up to the next intersection and then down that block as well. Lots of stores and interesting things around. Some of which I took photos of. But after a while my inner right groin muscle started acting up again so I made my way back to my hotel (via the store to buy drinks). I also asked the receptionist about laundry service in the hotel (getting down towards the last few changes of workout clothes) and she said to just bring them to the front desk tomorrow and they would wash them for me. I am going to assume that, like everything else in Jinan, the laundry service will be cheap as well.

Jinan streets at night

After getting back to my room I updated my blog (of which you are now the proud viewer) and tried to get my media from the day’s recordings sorted on my hard drives.

I was also able to finally test out an idea that I came up with a while back (and that probably only 2 other people who read this blog will find interesting).

One of the things I like to do is torrent TV shows from the U.S. that I can’t see here in China. “Heroes”, “Amazing Race” and “Smallville”, just to name a few. I have a desktop computer at home that I use as my dedicated torrent machine (and guest’s computer when someone is staying over) but the big problem for me was how to torrent and watch my programs while I was travelling. After a bit of creative thinking I came up with a free way for me to keep in touch with my favorite shows no matter where I am. It might seem a bit convoluted, but I am enjoying the process all the same.

First, I signed up for the free LogMeIn service ( logmein.com). It allows remote control of any system you designate by any other system you designate. There is a two layered password protection and since there is nothing on that system except TV shows I’m not really worried if someone actually does “break in to” it. It’s not that likely anyway. They also have a paid service that allows you to do things like file sharing and remote file management, but if you just want the free system you can just have the remote control. So, that allows me to access my home computer while on the road and set up my torrents. Then what?

Second, since I’m travelling I usually would want to watch the shows on my Treo 650. So I have the Pocket DiVX encoder on my home system and when i download a show I want to watch I reduce the file size down to about 32 mb for a half hour TV show and about 64 mb for a one hour show.

Third, from my remote desktop I sign in to YouSendIt ( yousendit.com) and I send myself the file from my desktop. This service is also free but they have a 100 mb limit. That’s not a problem since the files are all under 70 mb anyway.

After the file uploads to YouSendIt I get an email that my program is ready to download. Then I just download it with my Internet Download Manager and voila! I have my TV show on my computer. I stick it on my phone’s memory card and (not so) instant entertainment!

Yeah, it’s a little convoluted … but I’m happy I can watch my shows without any problems. Plus, it’s free, so that’s kind of nice too.

Anyway, I digress. That had nothing to do with being in Jinan (even though I did spend part of the evening downloading the latest episode of “ American Dad” as a test run).

But, there’s just two more mornings of wushu before the Sunday break and the start of my last week in Jinan. It was a quick trip, wasn’t it? I sure hope my groin (and the rest of my body) can hold out until it’s all over.

Click here to view my 2006 Shandong Gallery