I know I'm overdue for a post. Things have been busy busy around here. There's been a Taoist conference at the temple so we're training at the school now. Space is pretty limited but the conference will be over on the weekend. We got to go to inside though and see the opening ceremony with Taoists from all over China and the temple is all dressed up. It looks really cool.

We also have a tai chi competition coming up in a few days and about half our class is going to another competition in a different province the week after. We've been practicing mostly for that and although I generally dislike competition practice, this time it's been ok. I feel like I know the tai chi like the back of my hand so it's not stressful at all and because the people who are going to the 2nd tournament are being corrected lots, I get a lot of time to myself, which I LOVE! There is just no comparison between the quality of my practice with the group versus the quality when I'm on my own.

We also have to participate in a performance for....yep, you guessed it: the opening ceremony of the local competition and that means lame rehearsals. Seems like every little thing in China has some elaborate opening ceremony attached to it. They're pretty much all super boring too, at least once you've seen a few, so having to do that is always a chore. Not looking forward to that at all.

So overall, we're super-busy. I have had very little time to study Chinese or even watch the show I'm into now (Star Trek: Enterprise) but luckily that sweater I'm knitting is portable so when we have to go wait around for 7 hours or so like we did yesterday for that performance thingy, I have something to do. I'll bring a book next time too.

I've started a new knitting project, my first sweater! I'm excited. Yesterday I bought the yarn a needed. Today I did my gauge swatch and started the ribbing at the bottom. Hooray, hoorah!

The pattern is from knitty.com and it's called flugel if anyone cares. I hope it'll be easy but also interesting and, with big needles and yarn, fast too.

Not much else to say. We finished learning our form. It's long. There's a tai chi tournament at the end of the month that we'll probably start training for soon. I've never done tai chi in a tournament before, should be interesting.

mmmm.....

Just got back from a massage and I'm still floating. There's a pretty good local massage spot that we all frequent from time to time and I just decided to pop over tonight before starting a new week of training tomorrow morning. After all the performance stuff we've been working on, getting back into doing kicks again has been causing some soreness. The massages here are clothed, with a lot of pressure and some stretching stuff. I definitely prefer a western style oil massage but for the equivalent of 8 dollars, one can't really complain! These people also know us too and so they know we train hard and where we need them to focus. It's pretty nice.

I really want to go to Thailand someday and just get awesome cheap massages everyday.