Life in Xi’an: Visits and Visitors (12/26)

I have been negligent on sharing some of my non-wushu related adventures with all of you.  So I finally got around to uploading some photos that I have taken to share with you.  I actually have a TON of videos that I need to edit and post up as well, but it will have to wait until later in the week.

Wu Ya Nan Billboard

First up, well … okay.  This is sort of wushu-related.  I took some pictures of a billboard that they have outside of the wushu guan (武术馆) at the Shaanxi Provincial Sports Training Center (陕西神体育训练中心)  which features Wu Ya Nan and a Sanda athlete who both got medals at the recent All China Games in Binzhou, Shandong (山东滨州).  Check it out:

Dou Dou and Family

Waaaay back on December 17 Ruhi and I visited Xuixin (Susan), a local Chinese Friend who works/ed for Ruhi’s consulting company.  Her and her husband asked us over to help with some stuff and while there I got to meet her son, Dou Dou, who was super cute.  I took a bunch of photos of him, Susan and her husband which you can see here.

Holiday Visitors

During this holiday break we also have a few guests visiting our home.  On Thursday, the 24th, Chana and Charise, two sisters who are also from Seattle, came up from Macau to visit. They live/work down there and decided to visit Chana’s old haunt for the break.  Chana and Ruhi used to be roommates and actually Chana used to live in our apartment, so she is very familiar with the area.  I also used to hang out a lot with her brother, Cameron, who lives in Shanghai.  Small world, huh?

The day after they arrived, we went out to dinner at a really nice restaurant (good food , good prices) just up TuanJie Nan Lu (团结南路) from our place (about a block away) and got some delicious food.  Here are some pictures from that evening.

L-R: Charise and Chana

That evening another friend, Adam, whom you might remember from this video/blog entry, came to stay with us too.  We were lucky because he brought his guitar.  For those of you who don’t know, Adam is from Scotland and an AMAZING guitar player.  He is also super fluent in Chinese, having graduated from a Chinese university a few years back.

The morning after he arrived he graced us with some morning guitar playing.  I got some photos of our leisurely Saturday morning socializing and tried to get some video of us doing a bit of “guitar talk” as well.

NOTE: The video is only viewable on wushuzilla.com

Now, if you are reading my twitter feed or my facebook status messages, you already know that there was a big surprise birthday party that Ruhi put on for me on Saturday evening.  However, instead of adding it to this blog, I’m going to give it another entry, probably later in the week.  In fact, we took a LOT of video and I want to edit it a bit before posting it up.  A few highlights:

*Musical concert by Adam, including singing Shaanxi Style Opera for a surprised group of local Chinese

*Yuan Ming doing an aerial in my living room

*A surprise visit by Ruhi’s English students who went WAY out of their way to come to the party

*Amazing gift from Wu Ya Nan — Nike Shaolinquan shoes!

*Theater Sports and Musical Performances galore.

*Lots of great friends and lots of good times.

Stay tuned for that later in the week!

Also, I’m going to be starting a new regular feature, “Ask the ‘Zilla” where I answer some of the questions I get here on wushuzilla.com (or one of the other websites) related to wushu.  Quite a few have been coming in so I’m going to try and answer them (as best I can) here.  Stay tuned for that, probably on Tuesday.

No related posts.