• My Surprise Brithday Party (lots of videos footage)
• Friday’s wushu class (lots of wushu vids)
• Wushu Retrospective’s next chapter
• Catching up with my life in Xi’an

Yikes!  That is a lot of stuff to take care of.  I’ll try to pump that out as quick as I can.  Thanks for your patience!

- Mark

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Making Noodles (10/25)

First though, I realized that I forgot to post up a bit of footage and photos from waaaay back on the 25th of October after Ruhi and I had visited Garnett and Umesh at the Xi’an Translation University (西安翻译大学). When we got back home we dropped by the local market village and got some noodles at one of our favorite little restaurants. This time around, since I had my video and still camera I thought I would capture some of the magic.

We ordered mian piao, a noodle dish made with flat noodles. Here you can see some photos of them being made and put in to the cooking water.

And here is a video of our noodle dish being made.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV4hWLrgrj8

Are you hungry yet?

Winter Smog (11/24)

Anyway, moving back to the present, one thing that Xi’an has which is unique from the other cities I’ve lived in around China, is the winter pollution.  It is a combination of the high number of coal being burned in the winter for heat, as well as the fact that we are in a valley surrounded by mountains.  As a result there are some days when the winds are blowing the wrong way and you can barely see a block away from you, sometimes even less.  Here are some photos I took the other day in front of our apartment complex.

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you can really smell a sooty flavor in the air and it makes me feel like eating BBQ all the time.   It also makes running around the track at the Sports Center quite interesting.  But I suppose it is one of the reasons that Xi’an is a good place to visit in the spring, summer and fall.

Although, one nice thing about Xi’an in the winter is that it doesn’t get super cold.  Well, at least it hasn’t this year.  Unlike Beijing that is under a carpet of snow, or Shanghai with its super frigid winds right off the ocean, Xi’an is a bit farther inland so we don’t get super freezing. (Crossing my fingers)

Restaurant Eating (11/25)

On Wednesday night we got a little hungry so we went to one of the other restaurants in the outdoor market next to our building.  This one has yang ro chua’r, which is the main reason we go there.  We originally wanted to go to another restaurant but they were closed so we ate at this one.  Here are a couple pictures.  I would have taken some of the food, but it was gone before you knew it!

Meeting James at the Village (11/26)

And tonight we went over to Shi Da Lu’s Village Cafe to do a little work, get something to eat and meet up with James, a Friend of Ruhi’s who lives in Xi’an.  Actually he will be moving close to our home in another week or two so we will practically be neighbors!  Here are a few photos of us hanging out at the cafe.

And thats about it for this time around.  Tomorrow it is back to the wushu guan and some more training.  Its been great having a day to heal up and I hope my body took good advantage of it.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you in the U.S. and Happy Day of the Covenant for those who know what that is.

Site Updates (11/26)

By the way, I changed out the header of my website (and the website looks pretty different these days if you haven’t visited it in a while), wushuzilla.com.  There is a pretty good chance that, if you are reading this, you may not have visited in a while. I actually have my blog replicating to 4 different websites, so you may not even know I have the site at all.

I also have a few ideas for the site that I will try to implement in the semi-near future.  But we’ll see what happens.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please feel free to use my new contact form on my website too.  I’m happy to hear whatever you might have to say.

Related posts:

1. Life in Xi’an – XISU, Food, 4Dream and More …

… hmm .. maybe explain why you are doing that first.  Otherwise things could get weird.

I’m actually writing this on the 15th of November and post-dating it for tomorrow when I will be traveling from Fuyang to Xi’an (barring any unforseen snow storms).  I also wanted to post up some information on recent videos I’ve updated to my youtube channel and some changes I’ll be making to my website too.

Videos

I recently started putting up the 1996 China Nationals footage that I have on my hard drive up on youtube.  It isn’t the whole competition by a long shot, but it should give you enough of a feeling for the stuff there were doing that year.  Some great performances by the likes of Liu Hai Bo and Liu Qing Hua so be sure to check that out.  So far I’ve put all my women’s footage, including some traditional events (because they used to rock it Old School, back in the day), as well as men’s Chang Quan.  The men’s events will follow during the week.

You can see my youtube channel at http://youtube.com/wushuzilla

Here’s a quick one of LQH’s long fist:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvrNfWI0mVA

Updates

If you haven’t had a chance to sign up for my twitter feed, you can do that as well.  Just head over to twtitter.com/wushuzilla.  I also have a facebook fan page for those of you who want to keep in the loop through that network.  facebook.com/pages/wushuzillacom (I should probably change that name ….).

I’m going to be slowly rolling out changes to my website to help consolidate all of the content in to one location.  Mainly to do with my videos.  Having them on youtube is great, and it is good to have them organized into play lists there, but sometimes I think people just want to have a page where they can go and see all of the videos that they can watch listed together in an easy to read, chronological format.  So, one page has all the playlists for a specific competition, for example, instead of circulating through a ton of different pages on youtube through trial, error and lucky “related videos” finds.

If you haven’t noticed by now, the content for both narom.net and wushuzilla.com are the same.  I set it up so that the themes look different based on the URL you are visiting from, but the content remains the same.  It should keep me from having to repost everything across multiple networks.  I’m also going to try to figure out the deal with my alivenotdead accounts.  Having two of them is becoming somewhat problematic.  But more on that situation later (but any suggestions you have in the meantime would be appreicated though).

I am going to try to be a bit more responsible and accessible through my blog and online networks as well, so feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions about something.  I’m more than happy to help out if I can.  Especially if you have suggestions on ways to make thigns easier for visitors to wushuzilla.com. (Keeping in mind that this current design is PURELY TEMPORARY!)

I would say that probably most requests would be for specific videos, which is one of the reason all the 1996 stuff is going up right now, but keep in mind that I’m eventually going to put up everything I have online (if it isn’t already there) so if you are patient enough you will see it all there anyway.  I do get unusual requests from time to time so if you are looking for some esoteric or hard-to-find, let me know and if  I have it I’ll try to post it up for you.

I also have a few ideas for some regular features here, but I’m going to ease in to those gradually.  No need to rush things.  I’m not going anywhere (I hope).

I think is most of what I wantecd to write.  If not, I’ll post it up for the next update.  In the meantime, cross your fingers and dot your eyes, and if we’re all lucky, by this time tomorrow I’ll be back in Xi’an!  And hopefully soon thereafter back to training.

P.S.

Oh, by the way, my sickness is dying out almost as quickly as it came up.  I just have some residual coughing from a throat tickle right now, but barely even a stuffed up nose or a tingling head to speak of so that is pretty good news.  Yay for my immune system!

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