So, I’m back from China, and it’s been long enough now that I’ve sort of assimilated what happened a little bit.
The Second World Traditional Wushu Championships was good overall:
My forms went well - I was particularly happy with the two-handed sword. No medals this time, though.
The events were fantastic. In particular, the opening ceremony was nothing short of astounding. It was in a stadium probably twice the size of Aussie Stadium, which was half full of stage and half full of people. We got to do the walk through the center thing like at the Olympics, and I can completely understand why the Olympic athletes come out of it on a huge high. It was AWESOME. After the walk, we were treated to an hour and a half of high production values craziness, with huge HK and Chinese stars and heaps of awesome wushu.
The next big event was the trip to the Shaolin temple - this was amazing. There were 15,000 people doing demonstrations along the 2-3km road between the bus park and the temple. Every type of style, and every type of crazy stunt you can think of, and all for the athletes. And the temple itself was completely awesome - I so have to rewatch the original Shaolin Temple movie now…
There were heaps more awesome things, but I can’t remember half of them off the top of my head. Ask me about it next time you see me!
So, turns out that the WSA got filmed for an upcoming computer games-gadgets-online TV show on Channel 10. They were doing a story on a fighting game, and wanted to have some people do some of the styles from the game for real.
It was a lot of fun, although we made up a lot of the fight choreography as we went… Looking forward to seeing it, though.
The show will be screening on the 22nd of August, at 11pm, on Channel 10. Keep an eye out for it. 
Well, I won bronze in the Single Short weapon division of the Australian and Oceania Wushu Competition, for my two-handed sword form. Yay me!
The school did very well, with a whole heap of medals. Overall it was a great day, notwithstanding a few hiccups that were dealt with pretty well by Simon, William, and Sifu.
I’m really happy with how both my forms went, actually. I didn’t do well in terms of score with Xing Yi, but I didn’t really expect to, as the specific style of Xing Yi is quite rare and thus hard to judge if I’m doing it right. I was really happy with my sword form, and the division was really close - I actually got the same score as the guy who got second, but came third on averages, and the guy who got first was only 0.02 away.
Wooo!
Had a fantastic holiday with Trang’s family this last week. Diving on the Great Barrier Reef was the awesomest awesome that ever awesomed. It was heaps of fun hanging with Trang’s family for a week - though they’re very different to my family, they’re a great bunch of people. We did a heap of other touristy stuff while we were there, like riding cablecar skyrails, visiting rainforests, and in my case, being hungover on the day we were spending six hours driving. Which actually was kind of a bummer. But, all round, it was a great time. If only there hadn’t been that hiccup at the end… but things seem to be turning out reasonably okay with that too.
Wushu competition is really, really soon. Scarily so. I’m finding that I clicked on a couple of fundamental things about the sword, and so it’s a bit easier than it was. Hopefully I can pull everything together in time.
