Wow, I’ve been ridiculously busy these past few weeks…sorry I haven’t gotten around to
posting lately.
So what has been up? Well…I recently found some kung-fu classes. Well, actually they’re not
REAL kung-fu classes. Not the ones with swords and flying kicks in the air…sort of. It’s called
散打(san da), if you want to Google it, it’s on Wikipedia under “Sanshou”. San-da/San-
shou is a version of martial arts that was created in the late 20th century for fighters so
that they could still fight aggressively but there were rules preventing them from actually killing
their opponents. At a first glance, it looks more like boxing…except you can use kicks and stuff,
rather than just punches. And you don’t use boxing gloves.
At first, I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t actual kung-fu…but the fact is that kung-fu is
very unpopular in Kunming because (from what they say) they’re not really into that level of
high exercise. So, it’s just about impossible to find it here. But the more I’m getting into this
San-da, I really like it. I’m definitely getting my fitness back, and the muscles that I haven’t seen
since the soccer days. Yay!
Also, you still have to be super flexible too. My coach (he’s like 27 or 28 years old, so he’s not
like an old man, haha) can do a split both sideways and in the center. I’ve tried to do a center
split for maybe six years and I’m still not completely there yet. Ugh. But I’m definitely getting a
lot more chances to stretch, so I’m getting more and more flexible each time.
Just the other day, the coach showed me how he could do one of those forward flips with no
hands. It’s like a cartwheel without any hands. It was pretty awesome. He tried to show me how
to do it too, but at the time I wasn’t ready to be that brave, haha. Next time. Maybe before I leave
Kunming, I’ll be able to do one of those no-hand flips. That would be cool.
My san-da classes are pretty intense too. We meet every day except Mondays for an hour and a
half at night (7:30 to 9 pm). But even though it’s a lot of work, I love it. I’ve missed the feeling
of being tired after a really good workout. There’s another girl there too. It turns out she was
also looking for kung-fu classes and couldn’t find any, so she ended up at this place. She’s
German and doesn’t speak English, so we have to communicate in Chinese. Every time I’m
there there’s absolutely no English. So I definitely get a lot more practice in my Chinese. I really
like it, I’ve definitely think it’s helped my Chinese get better, and definitely motivates me to
work harder. AND…my coach speaks Chinese with an accent I’ve NEVER heard before…I can
tell it’s definitely a more rural accent. But even though he’s speaking “Putonghua”, I still can’t
understand his pronunciation at times. It takes getting used to.
Putonghua is the standard Mandarin…the one I’m studying. Most people in Kunming
speak “Kunminghua”, which is still Mandarin but I can’t understand it. Best way I can describe
it is if you heard an Irish person saying “top of the morning to you”…it’s English, but it’s
not standard English so if you only knew standard English (and you didn’t know commonly
used cultural terms/phrases) you wouldn’t be able to understand. America actually has a lot of
these. “Sup?”, the word “like” as a sentence filler (I like got to the store and like saw a really
cute pair of shoes), LOL, toodle-oo, and like a million more. (These weren’t the best examples,
but I can’t think of the good ones at the moment.) They are English words but not proper English
grammar, they’re slang that you tend to not use in writing papers and stuff. Kunminghua is like
that, I guess.
Anyway, even though my coach is speaking in the Putonghua, I still can’t understand him a lot.
So I’ve been studying new words and exercise vocabulary so that I can better understand him.
It’s definitely incentive to work harder with my Chinese. So that’s good.
More next time.
