I’m going to do something a little different this time around, I’m going to tell you a little bit about what I’ve been thinking and absorbing vs. just what I’ve seen. The reason for this is it’s Christmas, I’m missing my family and friends for the first time in my life during this time of year, and this is the time of year I feel like I catch up with all my friends from around the country and the world and we have our annual deep Christmas conversations. These conversations usually hold me over for about a year until I get to have them again the Christmas after that.
So, it’s been 6 months, it seems like 6 lives. I’ve eaten live octopus in Korea, I’ve seen cock fights in the Philippines, I’ve climbed the Himalaya mountains, I’ve trained and lived with the Shaolin monks, I was completely awed by Tibet, I hung out with monkeys and elephants in Nepal, and I’ve finally just stopped to think about all of it for a little while and just not do anything at all for a few days in Taiwan. Not too shabby. Of course the people I have met are the best parts. I have encountered travelers not unlike myself, people running from things, people running to things, and people just doing what they always wanted to do. I’ve made some life long friends from some pretty far out places. I’ve met some really awesome locals from every country and interacted with monks and martial arts masters. Writing down my thoughts on all of this is like trying to draw every star in the sky, there’s just too many.
Mainly, if anything had to come of any of this, it is that being a part of life, getting to share with people from everywhere, is overwhelmingly motivating. Some days I just want to run out the door and down the street and change the world and create things and leave my mark everywhere, ha, but I keep my head and my pace. Right before I left my friend Josh from UC and I were talking, and he told me this exactly, “Throughout…I’ve lost some very close friends very young. It just makes you realize that, if you have to do something, do it now. Otherwise, it’s going to be too late.” And I think about that everyday. Of all of the people I’ve met that I’ve deemed amazing, they all shared one quality, they are do-ers. They get an idea, they have a dream, they find their passion and they do it. In China, but especially Nepal and Tibet, I got to experience a lot of Buddhism. Buddha once said, “Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it." And it seems that it proves true in all the masters of life that I’ve met. My 92 year old Grandmaster Cacoy, the only 12th degree black belt in the world, loves to tell me all his secrets of life, secrets to life. He told me you must maintain a routine, you must constantly with all your energy pursue whatever it is that drives you, and you must find where there is no more to learn, and then you must change and go beyond that. He told me, “You know why I never lost, because I never stopped exploring, inventing, changing, learning, adapting, and pushing myself to find answers to questions no thought to ask. I had to invent questions, I had to change, I still do, I’m always changing once I’ve found an answer.” He said, “Once my wife told me I did martial arts too much, that I should not train so much, that maybe I should try something different. So I quit martial arts for about two weeks, and I gambled, played cards, drank liquor, which I never did, went to cock fights, stayed up late and got fat. When those 2 weeks were up my wife came to me and she said maybe you should start doing martial arts again and I never drank again.” Of course all of his stories end with his old Yoda chuckle.
When I lived with Shifu Hu, my kung fu master and Buddhist teacher, in the Shaolin Temple he taught me other lessons about life. He taught me about, “eating bitter.” Life is tough, no one can doubt that, and as I’ve traveled, especially in 3rd world countries I’ve seen poverty I’d never imagined. I passed by whole families, with naked children and week old babies, sleeping on pages of newspaper on the sidewalk with no blankets. Most of Shifu Hu’s students that he has taken in to live in his school are poor. Some were abandoned, some were delivered by their families hoping to give them a better chance to be anything in life. Shifu Hu said in each boy he looks for respectfulness and a willingness to "eat bitterness," learning to welcome hardship, using it to discipline the will and forge character. He said nothing is more important than character. These kids, some 4 or 5, train around 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in grueling kung fu, on top of that with schooling, and they all live in one barracks like compound in bunk beds, sleep on a thick blanket over a board, and each have 2 pairs of clothes. They have no heat, no air conditioning, almost nothing of entertaining value, and they never, ever, complain. They exist in a world beyond our mean for comfort and satisfaction, a peace of mind a lot of people pray for. Master Hu told me, “some day these boys will leave, they will go on and have jobs and lives, and things may get difficult, they will encounter hardships, but they will look back at their Shaolin training and realize nothing harder will ever exist. They will push forward and overcome.”
“The most important thing is to build character, to make a good person. For these 200 kids I have to be a dad and a mom with my small group of coaches, (all of whom are former students). It’s more than Kung Fu, it’s life, and the most important thing you have to teach them is how to live a good life, to be happy, to make the most of what they have, and to have a rich life. True Kung Fu is much more than physique and building a strong body, it is building a strong life. It’s mastering whatever you set out to do in life.”
Then Shifu Hu told me this story:
“There once was a warrior that went town to town challenging the best fighters, and he defeated them all one by one. Every town he came to he was unwelcome for the people knew no one could beat him and he would leave only after defeating their best warriors. One day he came to a town and as he did asked to fight the best warrior. No one came forward, except for an old man. The warrior said, “Old man you offer me no challenge.” The old man said, “Can you do this?” And he turned his hand over very carefully in a circle. The warrior balked at him and said of course I can and rashly twisted his hand in the air. Then the old man said, “Warrior, can you do this?” The old man very carefully took a pot of boiling oil and poured it into a pipe no bigger than a straw. It was his charge of filling pipes with scalding hot oil for machinery. The warrior said of course I can, and took the pot away from the old man and tried four times to pour the oil and not once successfully was he able to pour it into the pipe. The warrior grew irritated and said this has nothing to do with combat, this is useless, this is not kung fu, and he got on his horse and left town. Four years later the warrior returned to town, bowed before the old man, called him master, and begged to be his student. The lesson is that true kung fu is not about combat, or strength, or force, or even fighting, it is about mastering any skill to it’s fullest, it is about mastering life.”
And these are some of the things I am blessed to hear, these are the things that I challenge myself to do and see. There is a band called The Smiths, they have a lyric, “Shyness is nice and shyness will stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to.” It’s proven to be true, the only things I have missed out on are the things I have been too reserved to do, questions I was to timid to ask natives and strangers.
It hasn’t always been easy, some days I never speak English to anyone, sometimes several days in a row. My friend Eugene told me when he moved home from Europe, “When you leave there will be days that you hate, you will be miserable and you will miss everything from home. But those days won’t last, and you have to remember all the awesome and amazing things you are seeing and doing will always out number the bad days.” He’s been right, the bad days always pass. In a hostel I read on a wall, “In the end it’s going to be okay, because if it’s not okay- it’s not the end.”
These are the things I think about when I quit moving long enough to think, when I remember enough to write down, and when I’m not too shy to ask questions to people I’ve just met. In the spirit of Christmas, I’m thinking about my family and friends, I miss and love you guys and hope you get everything you want during this holiday season. The last thing I wrote down that I read worth repeating is this, “Love everything all the time, because there is no other option.” Alright everybody, MERRY CHRISTMAS! -Stephen
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Monday, December 5, 2011
Thrilla in Manila...
The Philippines, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve been here. I mean that in good, bad, every way possible. From the most amazing sunset I’ve ever seen in my life to the rampant prostitution and poverty that surrounds you in every big city. The ride has always just begun here. I arrived in Manila first, and after having split up for a good while Steve and I finally re-united in a part of the city called Malate. Inexperienced in the sociological boundaries of the city, our first hostel lay in the prositution and debauchery slum of the town. Entertaining, educational, strange, absurd, a life experience, all these describe Malate. With 3 hookers to every person, bars with midget wrestling, buckets of beer, and poor children running in the streets 24/7 I’m pretty sure this is the first stop, or test rather, that some have when they arrive in the Philippines. You are either in hell, in heaven, or an anthropological observer. I was the latter of the three, treating every experience as a person watching a documentary. Sometimes you just have to watch and absorb, be a sponge. After the madness of Manila, we headed north to Bagiou, which was way oversold, but had a really great museum of modern and contemporary Filipino art. The BenCab Museum was its name-o, after it’s founder the famous Filipino artist.
After a much-needed escape from Bagiou we headed to Vigan, which is a small and amazing historical town, and one of the oldest Spanish settled towns in Asia. The old 18th Century Spanish Architecture was beautiful, the food was much better then we had experienced thus far, and it was cleaner and less crowded with an above average hotel room (no roaches!). In the Philippines you pretty much just expect to almost always have roaches in your hotel room no matter how nice it is. After eating Longannisa, the delicious local sausage, and checking out most of town, we escaped one Sunday and went to a cockfight with the locals, it was pretty great. It’s not really taboo here like it is in America, in fact most of the towns men show up like a high school football game. There is betting, cheering, and if you were worried about the seediness, even an on duty police officer. After befriending some of the locals Steve and I got front row seats and even got to hold a champion rooster, hey hey! We were given a behind the scenes tour of operations and had one of the most informative, ridiculous, fun times of my life. Our friends cock even won it’s big fight, pretty cool. The loser became dinner. There are even cock fighting stores in the mall that sell supplements so you can pump up your cock, no pun intended. Cockfighting is big business. There aren’t taxis in Vigan so Steve and I rode around in “tricycles” which are essentially motorcycles with sidercars. You negotiate a price, usually super cheap, and then Steve and I cruise around in the sidecar while the driver sits on the main bike, a pretty funny sight. After Vigan we headed to Pagudpud, which is in the most Northern point on the main island of the Philippines several 100 Islands. Pagudpud is a beach resort town, with amazing beaches, sunsets, and delicious seafood. This is where I spent Thanksgiving and my 30th birthday. On the big day I ate a big traditional Filipino seafood meal with huge prawns the size of small lobsters accompanied by a mango sauce spaghetti. For desert I had good whiskey and hand rolled local cigars, it was excellent. At midnight on my birthday Steve and I jumped into the big ass waves of the ocean and enjoyed my first ever November 24th 30 year old swim in the Pacific.
After Vigan we headed back to Manila, watched Manny Pacqiou, national hero, congressman, and pound for pound best boxer in the world, defend his championship belt. The entire country shuts down and the crime rate drops to practically zero during the actual fight, the locals call it a national holiday. It was a cultural experience for sure, waking up at 8am to watch him fight live from Vegas with locals at a packed, and I mean packed bar. In Manila I ate the second grossest thing I have eaten thus far in Asia, it’s called Balut. It is a hard boiled duck egg, but the duck on the inside is partially developed, so you are basically eating a duck fetus, pretty gnarly, but with a little salt and vinegar the task was completed and never to be repeated. We met up with some friends we met during the big fight and they invited us to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner American style. One of the guys had been married to an American girl for many years and decided to cook a feast. He made turkey, gravy, mash potatoes, corn, stuffing, cheesecake, the works. It was amazing, we were in disbelief and ate to our hearts content followed by a long stint of in house karaoke, it is huge here!
At this point Steve and I split up again as he had some things he still wanted to do in Manila and I headed south to Cebu City. It is in Cebu where I met up with my martial arts Doce Pares Supreme Grandmaster Cacoy Canete, now that’s a title. He is 92 and still spritely and kicking ass. I arrived a day early to his home/school just to visit and figure out it’s location. To my surprise he invited me in his home for tea and biscuits and we ended up talking for the next several hours, mainly him ha, about his life and all that he had done. He even asked me stay for dinner and I hung out with his family and some other students until almost 11:30 pm. In his 92 years he was a commando in WW2, has fought over 100 fights, never lost, and never had a fight last more than 10 seconds. Additionally, he told me his secrets to living a great life. Train 2 hours everyday in a martial art or physical activity of your choice, always continue to change and improve whatever you do throughout life and push yourself, eat chicken for lunch and fish for dinner, and laugh as much as possible. He told me he has over 800 jokes memorized, but his family told me he has over 1,000 written down. He just laughs and laughs all day in a great grandpa style old man voice, but usually while telling stories of his many victories or when beating up his students in sparring he laughs in an evil hilarious old man giggle, in true old man master martial arts style. Apparently, at 92 he is writing another book on martial arts and a joke book as well, the man is unstoppable. My first day of training was amazing, I was training alongside masters from all over the world and got thrown right into 4 rounds of stick fighting on my first day, INTENSE! After a few days my hands were covered with blisters and I have small welts and bruises everywhere, haha, but don’t worry we are pretty safe and wear armor and helmets when we spar. I have probably learned more here in half a week than I have in 4 years of training stick fighting, and that is not a jab a my instructors at home, they are fantastic, these guys here are just simply amazing martial artists and amazing teachers. People always use the term martial arts family to describe the sort of comradery that exists between people who train together, and it’s really true. My masters and classmates have been unbelievably hospitable and treat me in the manner in which they would treat and old friend, these guys are really great. I am proud to be a practioner of Cacoy Doce Pares and to have had the chance to meet so many amazing people. It’s not all stick fighting here though, Cebu is the first place Magellan landed in the Philippines when the Spanish attempted to take over. I went and saw the cross he put up in the ground and the oldest church established here named Santa Nino, it was a Spanish style cathedral with peaceful gardens swamped with people making pilgrimages, as this is the most holy site in the country. In an interesting connection I am training the martial art here, more broadly known as Arnis, that the natives, specifically the national hero Lapu Lapu, used to kill Magellan. I will be heading to Taiwan at the end of this week and will be leaving behind the unbelievably unhealthy food of the Philippines. Goodbye fried chicken and cheeseburgers, you will not be missed. I look forward to my apartment in Taipei as it’s in an artist village and a few quiet weeks of nothing but writing, relaxing, and maybe a little teaching. I’ve been training and traveling hard and I think I have some much needed r & r coming to me. It’s been a wild couple of months, over a 100 kilometers trekking through mountains, training with two martial arts masters, and exploring more cities than I count, I’m ready for a little Christmas break. So, Taipei here I come and Philippines I will miss your friendly people and their above average Asian English abilities. Until next time, have an awesome Christmas, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, I miss everyone at home and I’m always thinking about you, I’m dreaming of an Asian Christmas…….
After a much-needed escape from Bagiou we headed to Vigan, which is a small and amazing historical town, and one of the oldest Spanish settled towns in Asia. The old 18th Century Spanish Architecture was beautiful, the food was much better then we had experienced thus far, and it was cleaner and less crowded with an above average hotel room (no roaches!). In the Philippines you pretty much just expect to almost always have roaches in your hotel room no matter how nice it is. After eating Longannisa, the delicious local sausage, and checking out most of town, we escaped one Sunday and went to a cockfight with the locals, it was pretty great. It’s not really taboo here like it is in America, in fact most of the towns men show up like a high school football game. There is betting, cheering, and if you were worried about the seediness, even an on duty police officer. After befriending some of the locals Steve and I got front row seats and even got to hold a champion rooster, hey hey! We were given a behind the scenes tour of operations and had one of the most informative, ridiculous, fun times of my life. Our friends cock even won it’s big fight, pretty cool. The loser became dinner. There are even cock fighting stores in the mall that sell supplements so you can pump up your cock, no pun intended. Cockfighting is big business. There aren’t taxis in Vigan so Steve and I rode around in “tricycles” which are essentially motorcycles with sidercars. You negotiate a price, usually super cheap, and then Steve and I cruise around in the sidecar while the driver sits on the main bike, a pretty funny sight. After Vigan we headed to Pagudpud, which is in the most Northern point on the main island of the Philippines several 100 Islands. Pagudpud is a beach resort town, with amazing beaches, sunsets, and delicious seafood. This is where I spent Thanksgiving and my 30th birthday. On the big day I ate a big traditional Filipino seafood meal with huge prawns the size of small lobsters accompanied by a mango sauce spaghetti. For desert I had good whiskey and hand rolled local cigars, it was excellent. At midnight on my birthday Steve and I jumped into the big ass waves of the ocean and enjoyed my first ever November 24th 30 year old swim in the Pacific.
After Vigan we headed back to Manila, watched Manny Pacqiou, national hero, congressman, and pound for pound best boxer in the world, defend his championship belt. The entire country shuts down and the crime rate drops to practically zero during the actual fight, the locals call it a national holiday. It was a cultural experience for sure, waking up at 8am to watch him fight live from Vegas with locals at a packed, and I mean packed bar. In Manila I ate the second grossest thing I have eaten thus far in Asia, it’s called Balut. It is a hard boiled duck egg, but the duck on the inside is partially developed, so you are basically eating a duck fetus, pretty gnarly, but with a little salt and vinegar the task was completed and never to be repeated. We met up with some friends we met during the big fight and they invited us to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner American style. One of the guys had been married to an American girl for many years and decided to cook a feast. He made turkey, gravy, mash potatoes, corn, stuffing, cheesecake, the works. It was amazing, we were in disbelief and ate to our hearts content followed by a long stint of in house karaoke, it is huge here!
At this point Steve and I split up again as he had some things he still wanted to do in Manila and I headed south to Cebu City. It is in Cebu where I met up with my martial arts Doce Pares Supreme Grandmaster Cacoy Canete, now that’s a title. He is 92 and still spritely and kicking ass. I arrived a day early to his home/school just to visit and figure out it’s location. To my surprise he invited me in his home for tea and biscuits and we ended up talking for the next several hours, mainly him ha, about his life and all that he had done. He even asked me stay for dinner and I hung out with his family and some other students until almost 11:30 pm. In his 92 years he was a commando in WW2, has fought over 100 fights, never lost, and never had a fight last more than 10 seconds. Additionally, he told me his secrets to living a great life. Train 2 hours everyday in a martial art or physical activity of your choice, always continue to change and improve whatever you do throughout life and push yourself, eat chicken for lunch and fish for dinner, and laugh as much as possible. He told me he has over 800 jokes memorized, but his family told me he has over 1,000 written down. He just laughs and laughs all day in a great grandpa style old man voice, but usually while telling stories of his many victories or when beating up his students in sparring he laughs in an evil hilarious old man giggle, in true old man master martial arts style. Apparently, at 92 he is writing another book on martial arts and a joke book as well, the man is unstoppable. My first day of training was amazing, I was training alongside masters from all over the world and got thrown right into 4 rounds of stick fighting on my first day, INTENSE! After a few days my hands were covered with blisters and I have small welts and bruises everywhere, haha, but don’t worry we are pretty safe and wear armor and helmets when we spar. I have probably learned more here in half a week than I have in 4 years of training stick fighting, and that is not a jab a my instructors at home, they are fantastic, these guys here are just simply amazing martial artists and amazing teachers. People always use the term martial arts family to describe the sort of comradery that exists between people who train together, and it’s really true. My masters and classmates have been unbelievably hospitable and treat me in the manner in which they would treat and old friend, these guys are really great. I am proud to be a practioner of Cacoy Doce Pares and to have had the chance to meet so many amazing people. It’s not all stick fighting here though, Cebu is the first place Magellan landed in the Philippines when the Spanish attempted to take over. I went and saw the cross he put up in the ground and the oldest church established here named Santa Nino, it was a Spanish style cathedral with peaceful gardens swamped with people making pilgrimages, as this is the most holy site in the country. In an interesting connection I am training the martial art here, more broadly known as Arnis, that the natives, specifically the national hero Lapu Lapu, used to kill Magellan. I will be heading to Taiwan at the end of this week and will be leaving behind the unbelievably unhealthy food of the Philippines. Goodbye fried chicken and cheeseburgers, you will not be missed. I look forward to my apartment in Taipei as it’s in an artist village and a few quiet weeks of nothing but writing, relaxing, and maybe a little teaching. I’ve been training and traveling hard and I think I have some much needed r & r coming to me. It’s been a wild couple of months, over a 100 kilometers trekking through mountains, training with two martial arts masters, and exploring more cities than I count, I’m ready for a little Christmas break. So, Taipei here I come and Philippines I will miss your friendly people and their above average Asian English abilities. Until next time, have an awesome Christmas, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, I miss everyone at home and I’m always thinking about you, I’m dreaming of an Asian Christmas…….
Sunday, November 20, 2011
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