Trees and Lollipops
Morning class was good.
Today was the start of Hopeless Star BOND camp. The first three lessons went well. We got a chinese assistant named Melina. A 19 year old college girl that is related to Boss John. So much nepotism in this company, but its china so its ok. When I found this out, I told Owen not to ask her out. ;-) We gave the students that didn't have an English name an English name. So, i decided to get a kick out of it. I named kids the following:
Jack, Rainbow, Tree, Lucy, Butterfly, Lollipop, and Violet.
Awesome! Peter got so mad at me when I told him.
I spent most of my free time today trying to figure out what school or what I was gonna do on my trip to Shaolin. Didn't go to the gym or practice becasuse of it. There is hardly any info online. I had Mountain call Tagou Wushu Center and he chatted with them and found out a price. It was expensive. 160RMB per day which included accomodation and training fee. I emailed the guy later on in the day. Appaerntly there are 130 foreigners there.
I will go check it out. It will cost about 4800RMB for 28 days. which is around $580 US. So much for me saving money from my payout.
The www.shaolin-wushu.de website has a review of only a few schools in Zhengzhou, Dengfeng, and Shaolin. Apparently they gave the official centers, Wushu Guan and Tagou bad ratings due to the high price and poor training facilities and not the same amount of training to foreigners. But those descriptions were 2 years old. Maybe they have gotten better. I did find out about, what the website highly recommends, the Songshan Shaolin Temple Xiao Long Gong Fu Training Center. Apparently they loved this school. The head foreigner teacher speaks good english and is friendly and doesn't beat chinese students for mistakes like other teachers do. He had high marks on this website. The price is about half of Tagou and sounded like it was better training too. Only problem is it is in Zhengzhou which is 3 hour bus ride from Shaolin.
What i could do is take 3 weeks at this place then a week at Tagou. Maybe. It depends on what I think of this school and Tagou when I arrive there on sundya and monday. I will fly in, check out this Zhengzhou school, then take a bus to Shaolin, and do that tourist thing and check out tagou and maybe stay the nite there. Then check out Tagou on monday and some other schools in Dengfeng. Then I will go back to Zhengzhou if I don't like it enuff down there.
It will be interesting!
Goodnite.