Peter Geedicke from Germany shares his experience training at the Yuntai Mountain School in China.
I (Peter Geedicke) trained at this Shaolin school for six months, experiencing everything from scorching heat to freezing temperatures. So I can say that I experienced all kinds of weather conditions that influence daily training, including one week of flooding with approximately 20 centimetres of water. Winter, with snow and cold temperatures, was definitely the worst. You are always freezing!
As for the training: the regular training with an instructor lasts about six hours a day, six days a week. However, you can extend this to around eight hours by doing additional training in the evening or instead of resting during the two one-and-a-half-hour lunch breaks. Training takes place exclusively in groups of around six international students. This allows the instructors to adapt the training more effectively to each individual. The first training session starts at 6 am and lasts until 7:30 am. Then there is a breakfast break until 9:20 am. The second training session ends at 11:30 am, followed by a lunch break until 2 pm. The third training session finishes at 5:30 pm.
Dinner is served until 6:30 pm, followed by another hour of evening training until 7:40 pm. You practise all kinds of Wushu (Kung Fu) techniques, including kicks, jumps, punches, strikes, acrobatics and all sorts of movement sequences that you may have seen in martial arts films. In addition, a new weapon or fist form is introduced every month (e.g. staff, sabre, sword, spear, nine-section whip, tiger, eagle, Shaolin forms, Wushu forms and Southern Fist). Sanda, the Chinese form of kickboxing, is also on the timetable twice a week. This is actually the only opportunity to really fight with your fists and feet against another person or to work with the punching bag. In addition, Taiji is taught twice a week. Here, too, you sometimes have the opportunity to test your skills against the others in Taiji fighting. However, you should have been training for a while, as injuries can easily occur.
At the moment, the school only teaches the Cheng style of Taiji, but it is excellent. With plenty of variety, including pushing hands, different Taiji fist forms and sword, sabre and spear forms, you certainly won’t get bored. There is more than enough to learn anyway.
The accommodation, with shared rooms for two people, air conditioning and a private bathroom (with cold water only), is quite basic, but luxurious compared with what the Chinese students have. Hot water is also available at a separate boiler in the school, and there are communal showers as well. So things could be much worse, perhaps in an old, draughty monastery on a mountain, without any facilities and in complete isolation. Anyone looking for that kind of experience will not be happy here. The school is located on the outskirts of Zhengzhou, a city with around six million inhabitants. Although it is surrounded by rice and lotus fields and the city centre is only about 20 minutes away by taxi, life in the surrounding area is still quite traditional and provincial. Compared with Beijing and Shanghai, it is a completely different world.
Free time: every Sunday and Thursday morning, the second training session is cancelled, giving you some free time. You can simply relax, explore Chinese city life or grab a quick bite of Western food at McDonald’s or Pizza Company. It is entirely up to you. The school organises an excursion almost every month for all international students. These trips are generally well organised. I visited Shaolin (Dengfeng) several times to see the temple and the Pagoda Forest. In Kaifeng, the next larger city, we visited an amusement park and a temple. In Luoyang, we visited the Longmen Grottoes. The excursions always lasted one day and were like school trips: lots of fun and a welcome change from the demanding daily training routine.
All in all, my time here flew by. I learned things I never even knew I was capable of doing, such as a standing backflip, throwing a needle through glass and many other amazing things. The Shifus are eager to teach you all kinds of skills. Of course, I also had a main Shifu with whom I spent most of the day. The relationship is serious during training, and there is no room for fooling around. Afterwards, however, we joke around all the more. Since practically all the Shifus speak English reasonably well, communication is not a problem. Of course, if you can speak Chinese, communication becomes much easier. Moreover, if you speak some Chinese, you automatically become a kind of translator for everyone who needs help or cannot understand the language. (…It’s great to be needed everywhere, but sometimes it can be quite exhausting…) Well, in the end, all I can say is that if I ever have enough time and money again, I will definitely come back.
But first, it’s time to leave the Middle Kingdom and return to the land of limited possibilities.
Peter Geedicke from Germany
