Думки вголос: Trip to China

05.07.2014

Saturday. One would expect having a very relaxed day. Indeed, it was.

Few days earlier, our group leader Sarah invited me and other people from our group to join her at practicing taiji at a park where she regularly goes to train. Me and my roommate Alasdair decided to try. For that, we got up at 6 am and travelled to the place with Sarah.

That was nice, intense and not very easy – I liked it, I saw some similarities and some differences to aikido, which I have been practicing for several years. The main teacher of their taiji group, Chen shifu, is a Buddhist monk (he became a monk recently) who has practiced martial arts (in Chinese 武术 - wushu) for 45 years. He was very hospitable, gave us a disk with some videos of his performance and even invited us to visit his place at some point. Speaking ahead of things, unfortunately, I was not able to find time to do this.

Chen shifu and me

Alasdair (leftmost), one of Chen shifu's most advanced students who actually did most of teaching,
and me (rightmost).

There were many other groups in the park, practicing different kinds of taiji, dancing, or just doing physical exercises.

After the taiji class (and breakfast!) we (now, the whole group) went to South China (lingnan – "to the South of Mountains") cultural park. It was a village some 60 years ago and then it was transformed into a park which combines traditional Chinese culture and architecture…

… with that time posters.

Apart from an interesting fishing show (where they showed some traditional ways of fishing in China)…

…and a nice acrobatic show, my attention was caught by one building. The temple of judge Bao (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bao_Zheng).

Perhaps, I would pass by without paying much attention to it if I hadn’t read a very nice fiction book by Ukrainian authors “Messiah cleans the disk” (http://ru.wikipedia.org/...), where judge Bao is one of the characters. (Apologies to my English-speaking - or rather not-Russian-reading - friends. Unfortunately, neither the book, nor the Wikipedia article about it was translated into English yet).

The rest of the day was occupied by a visit to a Chinese family (physics researcher Wen laoshi’s family, in my, Claire’s and Amy’s case), where we practiced our Chinese, had a small piano concert, did Chinese writing and tried a South China cuisine delicacy – chicken feet.

Me, Claire, Amy, Wen laoshi with his wife, his parents.
Cheng laoshi who taught us Chinese and accompanied us during this visit is taking the picture.
Children are having their dinner nearby.