Gongfu ist ähnlich dem Bildungsweg, den wir alle von der Schule aus her kennen. Man geht erst zur Grundschule, dann kommt man in die Unterstufe, Mittelstufe, Oberstufe und letztendlich in die Uni zum Studium. Für manche reicht ein gewisser Bildungsstand, manche gehen jedoch noch darüber hinaus und promovieren oder habilitieren sogar. Es gibt Leute die schneller sind und andere die langsamer sind, aber ohne zur Grundschule gegangen zu sein, kommt man nicht ins Gymnasium und ohne die Oberstufe gesehen zu haben fängt man auch kein Studium an. In den vorangehenden Stufen lernt man jeweils die Dinge, die wichtig sind, um in der nächsten Stufe weiterlernen zu können – oder zumindest sollte es so sein.

Deshalb liegt es an den Lehrern, auf allen Stufen, die Schüler auf die nächste Stufe vorzubereiten. Ihre Zeit nicht zu verschwenden, sondern ihnen möglichst sinnvoll und effektiv den Weg zu gutem Gongfu zu weisen. Doch genauso hängt es auch am Schüler sich über das gelernte Gedanken zu machen, gewissenhaft und fleißig zu trainieren und nicht seine Zeit (aber auch die seines Lehrers) zu verschwenden. Es ist also wichtig, dass beide, sowohl Lehrer als auch Schüler mit der richtigen Mentalität an das Gongfu Training herantreten. Was ist nun eine geeignete Mentalität? (more…)

I’m back from Qingdao and because of the cold I caught these days, finally have time to write a little something (pictures are already up in the gallery Qingdao 09. My trip was really nice, most of the time I lived with my Shi Bo (Gongfu uncle) Yu Bin, who’s now proud father of a cute son. Our days were mostly very healthy waking up a t 6am for training, breakfast, relaxing/training, lunch, working, dinner, long talks about Gongfu and going to bed early at 10pm. Everyday I would learn a lot, but not forms (not counting the new Bashi (8 stances) we have in our family), but the very basics of energy and fighting. My notes for each day would be longer than they’ve been in years, learning about the small details and some traditional training methods of our family, but also clarifications of our history and theories. Even found out why our Beng Bu differs so much from other families.

Yu Bin gave me a task, which concluded writing an article about how traditional Gongfu (especially Tanglang Quan) should be trained and I’m happy to tell you, the first draft is already finished. For now it’s in German and will be posted here on this blog, but I’ll be working on a translation as soon as I finalize the German one.

We also talked about how to get the abstract theory and basics that are inherent to Tanglang Quan more clarified not just for students in our family, but for everyone out there. So (hopefully) starting soon, we’ll post more and more translations and explanations of the basic theories like 12 keywords, 5 principles, 7 long 8 short, 12 soft 8 hard on the website of the Wan Fu Qingdao School in the philosophy section (under training). Some are already online – thanks goes to Yu Bin’s Tudi Felix, who besides his job, managed to translate all those for the website. For now it’ll be just these bits and pieces, but maybe they’ll find their way into a book of sorts, but keep in mind all of these won’t make you a better practitioner, a good teacher and hard work does!

As my trusty Nokia E71 got lost/stolen I had to get a new Phone. I didn’t wanna go back to a non-smartphone so I looked at what they had in stores at Zhongguancun Tech Market. Narrowing it down to either an iPhone or an HTC Android device, I finally went with an iPhone 3G 16GB (as the HTC Hero wasn’t on sale yet). The price was about €100 cheaper than in Germany for a fully legal unlocked Hong Kong version.

After several weeks I feel I can safely say I don’t regret my decision. Battery life is better than expected (at least here on GSM) and the nice screen makes reading news and the occasional website finally possible without headaches. I don’t have to tell anything about the famously great handling and the vast choice of apps in the App Store, but I would like to recommend some apps that make my everyday life easier: (more…)

Attention geek speak following:

Just implemented PubSubHubbub on this blog using a very easy guide (PubSubHubbub + Wordpress + Feedburner + FriendFeed = Realtime Awesomeness). In the process I moved my RSS feed to FeedBurner, so now you can read the whole posts directly in the feed (incl. pictures and videos). What PubSubHubbub essentially does, is push updates of my blog in realtime to services subscribed to the feed (for example FriendFeed). This means you can now see a new post from my feed in near realtime appearing in my FriendFeed stream and Google Reader.

Mike Martello was a great friend, a teacher and mentor to so many of us. On June 2nd 2009 he passed away doing what he loved to do: teaching martial arts. He devoted his life to bringing at least a little piece of the vast amount of experience and skill he had attained to everyone open enough to accept it.

The world has lost a great man, but he won’t be forgotten as he’ll live on in everyone of us, who were lucky enough to know him.

Also visit Jake’s blog for lots of memories and links to tributes to Mike.

There’s a new site dedicated to Mike at http://mikemartello.com/

I went out of the house, walking through the sun I smelled something familiar. It reminded me of spring in Teheran. There’s lots of similarities between Teheran and Beijing. Not only the masses, traffic and polution, but there’s the dry weather, workers watering the greens and flowers in spring and lots of small details that kind of subconciously make me like this city even more. Not many people see these simliarities, but even chinese and persian culture have lots of things in common. Is Beijing maybe the Teheran I always wanted?

It’s been more than 5 weeks since I moved here and I know it’s also been nearly a month since my last real post on this site. We took lots of pictures, but most of them are inside of restaurants. Seems like the only thing we’re doing these days is working, sleeping and – on weekends – watching movies and trying out nice food places – doesn’t sound very interesting, but it’s been relaxing and fun. I’ve also been cooking a bit more these days.

As for gongfu, it kind of looks like my blog activity. First I was busy, then I was lazy and now I got problems with my wrist, but I’m planning on definitely starting training in May! – I promise

A really well done and creative self-introtuction by gradtuating designer 马文

Source: 八八吧 :: 88 Bar