February 22nd - Exploring the Village

The School's weather is great today

Morning/Afternoon Thoughts 🌞

Well, as with every Saturday I called my mom, dad and sister talking to them about how they are and how my time is here. Its always nice to see what everyone is doing as I can get so focused on what I'm doing and struggling with that seeing we are all dealing with our own day to day life is... "grounding". If you've read the other post, then you'll know I'm injured with a hurt knee so I can't do much besides rest and some light stretching.

What will my plans for today be?

I want to do some arm workouts that I normally don't do. Pushups will be one of them and maybe curling some weights will help too. Nothing too strenuous as I noticed this morning that my knee is still very sensitive to support at the moment. After the arm workout I plan on doing some normal stretches and maybe looking up some other kinds of stretches to help my lower back and "forward" flexibility for the forward splits.

Lunch: 豆干, Chicken, 豆芽, and other veggies with rice

Once my "training" for the day is over I plan on reviewing my Chinese vocabulary and then programming a lot more. Hopefully, I can experiment today with different ideas I have for this tutorial project to really test if I am understanding the programming language or just copying the tutorial.

Although I am still antsy about resting all weekend I think it will be worth it in the end as I do feel way less sore before and I have been getting some great sleep the past few days. God works in mysterious ways so I should look at this like a blessing instead of a curse.

I also am thinking about watching a Kung Fu movie to end my day rightly as I think it will give me some good time to really relax, forget about training and my injury, and also give me motivation or new ideas for when I get back into practicing Kung Fu.

Life is full of ups and down, how high and low you go depends on how you react to the change.

The nearby village is finally open

Evening Thoughts 🌝

My evening went almost as planned... but not exactly. After eating a great lunch we were all informed that we could go into the local small town (or "village") to go buy some things. Of course, me being curious, immediately went with some other students. We all limped through various farm lands and past small houses until we came to this small town center where we were looked at by the old and young Chinese that lived in the area. I bought various things like Red Dates, Goji Berries, Bananas, Sesame Cookies, Dragons Eye Fruit and Candy. I've been trying to ration them but man I didn't realize how hungry I have been. It might also be that I've been in the room most of the day as well...

Anyways, later on I did pull ups, push ups and sit ups outside so that I could enjoy the great weather that we had today. So I did get a little tiny workout in! And then slowly practiced my Long Fist Form so that Monday I'd be prepared for the Master's review. Then I went and ate a good dinner followed by me working on some new designs for a custom hat that I'd like to buy while I'm here. (Man, in the summer I will be buying so much stuff) This was, of course, followed by watching some kung fu videos and snacking.

My "Birthday Tea", Red Dates, and Goji Berries, all needed to make a refreshing tea.

Which leads me to now where it is almost time to head to bed so that I don't eat all of my newly bought snacks. It has been a fun and relaxing day at Maling Kung Fu School and I'm starting to see what a previous student meant when he said, "The seasons will also change this school".

I can't wait to see how things start to change in the spring.

What do you think of the few changes I've made to the blog layout?

Don't forget to check out my Instagram for other posts. I can't post videos here due to the VPN issues and slow internet.