What a LONG week!

Well there's no longer any need to feel trepidation about the gentleness of our first training week. Shifu definitely brought the beat down this week. We spent a lot of the early part of the week drilling forms over and over, always being pushed to do it better, faster, and more powerfully. Then the weather changed and almost every morning this week there was light rain which means we had to train inside. One would think we'd be happy to train inside on a cold day but it's generally the same temperature as outside and our options are rather limited for the activities we can do in our small indoor space. We ended up doing Sanda training every day (sometimes 2x) with lots of punches, combinations, and speed/power drills. One day we did power lifting, one day squats, frog jumps, duck walking, etc. It was ridiculous trying to walk down the stairs for 2 days afterwards.

Because it's Chinese New Year we get 4 days off this week but to make up for it we didn't get our usual Thursday off, making an already long week even longer. Needless to say we were all really relieved to see the end of this week.

On a different note, the celebrations have been really cool. Two things that are ubiquitous at Chinese New Year are food and fireworks and we've had plenty of both. Last night at midnight was a huge fireworks show with pretty much everyone in China blasting off explosives both big and small. A group of us foreigners got together and purchased some cool crates of fireworks to set off in addition to the ones that Shifu had already bought for us. But that's only half the fun because you can get a kajillion different firecrackers and small sticks of basically dynamite. There are really pretty ones that spin on the ground and look like flowers and big red sticks like something out of Loony Tunes that explode with a deafening BOOM and everything in between. Who knew blowing things up could be so much fun? Well after the week we had, it was an awesome (cheap) way to blow off some steam.

And now 3 more days off to rest before we get back to being pounded into a mushy pulp in class again.