Kicking Through Life

The Shaolin Monastery or Shaolin Temple (Chinese: 少林寺; pinyin: Shàolín Sì) is a Chán Buddhist temple at Song Shan nearZhengzhou City Henan Province in Dengfeng, China. It is led by Venerable abbot Shi Yǒngxìn and martial abbot Shi De Li. Founded in the 5th century, the monastery is long famous for its association with Chinese martial arts and particularly with Shaolin Kung Fu, and it is the Mahayana Buddhist monastery perhaps best known to the Western world.^[1]

(Thank you, WIkipedia)

Our group were granted special access into the elusive Shaolin Temples for a few days.

We gawked at amazing sportsmanship

And two-fingered pushups (!)

Then visited the top Shaolin school in the city filled with many Shaolin schools.

We were greeted with hundreds of students lining our entrance way, enthusiastically clapping for us the entire time we strode onto campus. Talk about a welcome!

We checked out observed these students at work. (Hey, give us a break, four girls have already gone a week without really substantial eye-candy! Momma needs her sugar!)

The school was mostly testosterone-heavy so I had to give some blog love to this cute little girl who was trying so hard to stay in line with the boys. Look at the strength and determination on that face!

We began our own training shortly after, taught by our super awesome (and cute!) shi fu. (I'm telling ya, it's been almost a week by now!)

You'd think we're just doing some stretching exercises from these pictures here but it was hard work learning all those moves! Muscles that I didn't know existed were getting stretched.

I ended up feeling quite sick during one of the afternoon practices so I stayed out of that lesson. But I did get to catch some of it on tape. Apologies for the weird conversation I was having with these two guys who were off-camera. They kept telling me to center the shot and I was like, "no, I'm trying to GET the people in the back!"

Here we are performing our moves to the poor, unassuming visitors of the temple. When we first started, a bunch of people were recording us, thinking we were some hotshots. And then they realized we were just a hot mess and ran away.

Apologies for my performance. I was not feeling well! But I'm a trooper, right? Right.

After that, we grew muscles the size of Popeye's and can kick anyone's butt if need be. The end.