This has been a rather strange week. There are a lot of changes happening at the school right now. Our class has started training together with one of the Chinese kids classes. Let me explain: all of the students at the school are split up into numbered classes according to how long they've been here and their skill level. 1st class is the long time Chinese students who help coach other students and already know almost all of the forms, they have been here for 4-8 years and are between 18 and 23 years old. The 2nd class is Chinese students who have been here for 2 or 3 years, they know a lot more than we do and are super duper fast. They are usually around 15-17 years old. 3rd class is my class, we're all foreigners in the traditional program who have been here for just over 1 year. We're really old (20-35) by Chinese standards and thus have pretty unique strengths and weaknesses. Then there is the 4th class of Chinese students who have been here less than a year, some as young as 10. There is also the other foreigners class called the "health promotion class" for a wild assortment of people from all over the world who stay for anywhere from 2 years to 2 days.

This week the 2nd class's teacher had to go home for a family emergency and 2 other coaches are going to teach in Europe for a month so Shifu has combined our class with theirs. Luckily we're working on something that they really needed to review but it's still really bizarre to be training with them. It's not much more difficult training but the vibe of the class makes it a lot more challenging. Most of the kids are terrified of Shifu so you can practically smell their fear in the air. It's really difficult to stay relaxed in that kind of environment and really tiring too. We were all pretty happy to get to the weekend.

I'm sure that a few more weeks like this and everyone will relax and get in the groove. It's helping my Chinese a lot so that's cool and I know we'll get faster just through osmosis.