10/13 Tai-chi
I didn’t go to practice last week, and the typhoon hit on Saturday, so practice was canceled. This Wednesday was Double Ten, a holiday. So I didn’t get back until Saturday at CKS Hall. Workers were taking down a bunch of scaffolding left over from the celebrations, and I took pictures of them.
Not many people were there this time, though I showed up late, around 10:30. The black-shirted Kung Fu guys were nowhere to be seen or heard, but some students were practicing cheerleading routines.
I didn’t get much pushing in this time; mostly I went through my forms. Teacher Xu told another student not to just go limp when confronted with force. “Relaxing isn’t the same as just letting go of everything,” he said, and I realized that that is probably what I’m doing wrong when I’m trying to relax, i.e., I’m confusing relaxing with just letting go of everything and throwing it aside. I should instead relax, but keep everything in the game, so to speak.
While I was pushing with the UPS guy, a large, chunky foreigner and his extremely blonde girlfriend walked up after watching us for a while. It turned out that they were Austrian. “We have something similar in Austria,” he said, demonstrating a kind of pushhands where the feet are outside of each other and the opponents hold hands and try to shake, push or pull each other off balance. He tried it a few times with the UPS guy and failed. Then they tried to do regular tuishou, and the UPS guy kept pushing the Austrian guy over, as his girlfriend watched with an encouraging expression on her face. I felt kind of bad for her, and was about to suggest letting the Wookiee win when the UPS guy lost a few bouts. Whether he did it on purpose or not I have no idea, but the couple seemed gratified when they finished.
