We had lessons again, and instead of going out for lunch, we decided to try the school’s canteen food for the FIRST TIME. How courageous right… haha… apparently, shanghai jiaotong uni has this big canteen, can A look-alike, with many stalls… but ALL selling the same thing – mixed rice, just that you go to different stalls for different dishes… -_-“ the food’s rather cheap though, I think it was about 1RMB for vege, & 2-4RMB for meat dishes… we can only use the student/staff card there though… which means we’ll have to go to those top-up machines and pay for the food using the pre-paid value stored in our cards… beside the canteen was a small eatery selling various types of noodles, where we decided to get our lunch… I wanted to order 红烧鸡块面 but they didn’t have, so ended up ordering 红烧牛肉面… it cost 6RMB… cheap, but really lousy… yucks… it was supposed to be 刀削面 but the noodles were of all weird shapes, sizes and thickness, and tasted like flour in saline solution… you wouldn’t be able to tell it was a 牛肉面 coz there was nothing but one small pathetic cube of 牛肉 inside the 面, which was considered very lucky already, coz poor William didn’t even have that one tiny cube of meat… -_-“ there were just cubes of potato in the soup, instead of signs of any meat… >_<
红烧牛肉面
After our lousy lunch, we went to check out shanghai jiaotong uni’s version of “nanyang supermart”… haha… not bad, quite a lot of stuff ranging from food and drinks, stationery and clothes to pirated movies, games and cigarettes… -_-“ bought a nice shanghai jiaotong uni organiser there... =P
new organiser! =)
Went back to our class for our 文化交流课 (cultural exchange lesson) and we were just looking forward to our post-lesson activity – tkd training!!! *hurray* haha… after lesson, we went over to the nearby metro city to have our dinner at the food court… both of us ordered this curry katsu omu rice for 23RMB… it wasn’t hot enough, but tasted not bad… once again, there was a bowl of cold and starchy soup to go with it… think it’s served free at most of the food stalls at this food court… yucks… so anyway, after our filling lunch, we had to walk quite a distance back to school for our training, which was a good thing, coz it helped in the digestion of our dinner, and felt like a warm-up before our official training…
curry katsu omu rice =)
The original tkd coach wasn’t around that day, so a stand-in coach came down… he looked quite pro as well… holding a 4th dan… we started off with lotza stretching, and for some reason, the coach suddenly approached me and asked what belt I was… hmm… I guess he probably heard about us from the others after our previous appearance… so, reluctantly, I told him I was 2nd dan… I almost forgot that I was a 2nd dan actually… felt like I was still a 1st dan, coz I don’t feel any difference whether I get that extra golden tip on my belt or not actually… haha… so anyway, he also asked William, who told him he was brown belt, and well, he kinda gave us a look that said “hmm…interesting… we shall see where your standard lies…” -_-
We had a stretching activity for butterfly stretch where we had to pair up, and one person would push the other person from behind, then the 2 will switch over. Apparently, I was pairing up with this guy, and he did the stretch first, so I was pushing him down from behind… and beside us was William, paired up with 蜡笔小新！the mischievous fat boy who ‘bullied’ us previously… there William was, suffering under the immense weight and pressure of the boy’s body… really pitied him, bet our inflexible William could feel his bones breaking and muscles tearing… haha… =P but well, later we had a switchover, and when I was doing the butterfly stretch, my partner was supposed to push my back down, but after a while, he kinda just gave up and didn’t really bother exerting strength anymore… so the coach saw and suddenly asked him, “喂，你在偷懒啊？” but the guy behind me replied “你看！我根本都不用压，她已经趴在地上了。。。” ok lor… my fault… -_-“ but while doing my stretch, I was greatly entertained by William and the fat boy, coz this time round, it was William taking revenge on the boy… hahaha… William was like leaning quite a lot of his weight on the boy already, yet the boy still kept scolding him “你没吃饭啊？干嘛不压下来！” hahaha… then william was like “yah yah… I didn’t have money for dinner… do you want to treat me?” and the boy replied and supposedly asked him out for supper after training or something… hahaha… hilarious lah… =D
So anyway, we kinda focused on mainly pattern today… the coach took a few of us black belters, while the coloured belters went to train their patterns separately with the assistant instructor. Oh, in case you’ve forgotten, I actually wear a white belt dobok to training, so it must’ve looked rather odd for me to be standing there, with all the other black belters… we first did koryo (1st dan pattern), and it was fun! Haha… reliving all the past ivp pattern training memories… I miss doing pattern!! Haha… the coach supposedly corrected one of my knifehand strikes in the series of movements after the double side-kick… he said it was supposed to be horizontal, although what we learnt was the philtrum level… but well, perhaps the rules have been changed again? Who knows… so I just followed what he said anyway… as for most of the other steps, I didn’t have much of a problem coz I’ve already known and practiced the new style before, but a few others seemed to be having difficulty executing the movements accurately coz they lacked attention for specific details like height of punch, placement of punch (solar plexus level), double twisting action for hand motions, preparatory moves for blocks and strikes, etc… most importantly, their side kicks weren’t that zai… the coach was commenting to some of them that their double side-kick was wrong coz they twisted their upper body too much and showed their back while executing the higher side kick (as if doing a backthrust). The correct method was to maintain a proper side profile while doing both the lower and higher side-kick without a sudden jerking motion… haha… interesting… so anyway, although these black belters didn’t have very impressive patterns, please don’t get the wrong idea that they must be noob, coz I believe they’re probably one of the many who focus on sparring rather than pattern… =)
We then moved on to keumgang (2nd dan pattern)… I’ve never officially learnt the keumgang pattern from anyone as there aren’t many who know the accurate details of the moves for this higher level pattern… moreover, after all the latest changes to poomsae, many who knew keumgamg before have also become unclear as to how various key moves ought to be executed now… according to the coach, he was teaching us according to the latest wtf standards, so hopefully what I learnt from him would be the same as that recognized by stf as well… after keumgang, we had a short break, after which the coach decided to pick a few of us to practise taebaek (3rd dan pattern)… he asked me how long I’ve been holding a 2nd dan and I told him that I’d just gotten it recently… so at first, he was like… hmm… then it might be too early to learn taebaek… so he turned to a few other 2nd or 3rd dan black belters and asked if they wanted to learn taebaek, then he changed his mind and said “你们的功夫都还不到家，怕你们越学越糟。。。” basically, he told a few of them that their skills were not there yet, so he was afraid that they might end up screwing up their earlier patterns if they learn taebaek now… so he suddenly turned back to me, and just asked me to join in… to learn taebaek with this 3rd dan guy who was going for grading… I was like…yay!!! Haha… exciting… I sorta learnt taebaek before when I was really young… probably at the age of 11 or 12? When I was a brown belter or something… my instructor then just taught me quite a few patterns in advance… koryo, keumgang and taebaek… but of coz, he himself wasn’t that pro at pattern… so he roughly taught me the steps only… with lotza mistakes in between coz he wasn’t that sure about the advanced patterns… he would get confused with the sequence of steps… haha… so you can imagine, an 11-year-old learning & relearning over and over again coz this lesson, he would teach sequence A, next lesson, he would say he taught some part wrongly, & reteach a sequence B, then the following lesson, he would say actually sequence A was partly correct, so it became sequence C… haha… you get my point… so well, in the end, I just got a rough idea how the patterns were like, but since that was so many years ago, obviously I would have forgotten them over time… only koryo would be better coz of ivp training… speaking of which, I’m really excited to start ivp training once I return to sg! =P so anyway, when training finally ended after about 2 hours, the coach walked up to me and asked what my coach’s dan level was, and I told him 4th dan… so he just suddenly said something like “噢，你的品质很好，打得很不错。。。原来新加坡的水准挺高的。。。” and somewhat nodded in approval as he walked away… (translation: “oh, your standard’s pretty good… so singapore’s standard is actually quite high…”) hahahaha… wow… really flattered… yay… =P glad we didn’t throw s’pore’s face… =D
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