Wow

Alright, I’ll divulge a bit more information. The class first started off with a good pep talk from Wu Bin, he said he would like to see the US place in the top 3 :) ( because we know who #1 is ). Otherwise, Cao Yue led a almost identical warm up that he did on Sunday. He had us stretch for a while, then made us hold the center splits while he came around to everyone and pushed them a little more. After that was basic kicks, and the pace was GREAT. It wasn’t slow, but we were not going at a break neck pace either. He also gave everyone little corrections here and there. The we did some jumps, but by the it was 8pm, so quickly on to the real lesson.

Those of us that did the performance didn’t get the chance to see him do it on stage, so we were in the dark as much as everyone else. It’s a really cool traditional from, reminds me of bagua with a little longfist and a smidgen of piqua. I was also surprised I made it through the entire form, start to finish, without a complete breakdown ( like I did with fanziquan and nandao). It was also nice to have him explain the application of some of the moves, it gives you a good idea of how YOU should do it.

Class ended around 9pm or so, and with all the horse stances in that set my legs were twitching ( thats good though, we really worked on our basics just doing that form ), and then we all got our pictures taken with Wu Bin and Cao Yue. Really nice guy, I’m always expecting people of that level to be sort of snobbish, but CY and other professional wushu athletes are always really REALLY nice. Actually, its the non-china “advanced” wushu practitioners that have a tendency to look down at people.

I’ll put up a page with photos on the site, work on the NEW site with any luck. I also did a dry-run of upgrading the current wushu west forms from phpbb2 to the new phpbb3, which is supposed to have better spam control. I’d like to customize a theme that would look like the new wushu west design, but crap, have you see a phpbb theme? Its MASSIVE, and not just the css and gifs but also the html templates… I dunno, I’ll see how far I can get with it. With that though, I may prune some of the un-used topics, or move them to a “General” thread. Or just get rid of the damn thing, I mean no one goes there anyways.