My New Life's Work

"Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage."

One of my favorite quotes from Cloud Atlas pretty much sums up why, after a few too many infuriating email exchanges with Real Gap, I've decided to dedicate my unemployed life to taking them down.  Well, maybe not taking them down, but at least writing enough reviews, and messaging enough people on facebook, to lose them substantial money.  I think it's a worthy use of my time.

A few highlights of our interactions:

Me:  In no way, shape or form was this class for "all levels" like you said.  On day two we were being asked to perform dangerous acrobatics with people who had been at the school for up to a year.

Fisa Liddmore*, Real Gap: Safety is paramount at the school and in the shared acrobatics session, the moves students were asked to carry out were tailored to ability and longevity of stay. You were carrying out moves of differing difficulty levels to the students who had been there longer.

Me: Unless you were hiding in the back of our class, you don't really seem qualified to tell me what we were and were not asked to do.

Fisa Liddmore, Real Gap: We are satisfied that the services you received at the academy were consistent with the programme information you received before you arrived.

Dear Real Gap.  You messed with the wrong retired lawyer.


**The name of the Real Gap representative I found so useful has been changed due to a cease and desist letter sent by Real Gap asking me not to name their representatives.

Where have you gone, my folly of youth?

You know how you feel invincible to injury when you’re young? Well, we are officially no longer young. It’s always been a weird goal of mine to study kung fu in China and when I got Juan on board it seemed nothing could stand in my way. Boy was I wrong.

Nothing could have prepared us (except maybe 5 or so previous years of intense martial arts training) for what awaited us at the Rising Dragon Martial Arts Academy in the Fujian Province of China. Sold by RealGap, a company that organizes gap years and similar programs for all ages, the program (anywhere from one-month to years) was marketed as being for “people of all levels and abilities.” Nothing could have been further from the truth. Within the first two days, we were being asked to do squats with people on our shoulders, run a minimum of 6 miles a day, do knuckle push-ups with our feet on the wall, perform backward somersaults into hand-stands, crawl down stairs on our hands, do headstand flips and more. Seven hours of training on about 3 oz of protein a day and often no running water for showers… It didn’t take long to realize we were in over our heads; every aching muscle and daring stunt further convinced us that we were likely to sustain some sort of injury if we stayed. Oh, how I miss the folly of youth that would have scoffed at my present self’s aversion to risk.

We quickly retreated to the class where everyone else of lower ability was hiding: the internal tai chi class. Unfortunately, performing the same basic movements for 7 hours a day was mind-numbingly boring and we decided to high-tail it out of there. Sadly, I think this means I’m about 10 years too late to become a kung fu master. Oh, well. Maybe I’ll find a more suitable area for self-improvement. Suggestions welcome.

Wax on, wax off

When I first told my mom that Juan and I were headed to a Buddhist temple for a few days, her response was, “How relaxing.”  As it turns out, not so much. 

Each day began with morning chanting at 4:30am.  If you were even a minute late, you must perform 3000 bows – a process which reportedly would take from 8-9 hours and leave your knees begging for mercy.  I was somewhat skeptical they would enforce this punishment against tourists, but I also wasn’t willing to risk it.  Unfortunately, this meant I was awake most of the night babysitting our $4 Brazilian alarm clock which, sure enough, stopped working around 1am our first night in Golgul-sa.  It did mysteriously start working again the next day, but obviously trust is like a mirror, once it’s broken...

After morning chanting, we had 30 minutes of sitting meditation.  We now know it’s surprisingly hard to focus on meditation when all you can think about is how cold you are, how you’d rather be sleeping, or how the resident puppies on the pillow behind you are snoring like old men.  The rest of our days were filled with walking meditation, sparse vegetarian meals, community service, and two sessions of Sunmudo training – a uniquely Korean zen martial art passed down from generation to generation by Buddhist monks.

Most of our Sunmudo classes were taught by a Norwegian who has been studying the martial art in South Korea for the last six years.*  We sort of expected he’d have some watered down exercises for the tourist initiates.  Wrong again.  Our legs haven’t been this sore since Roraima…

We were also around for a couple of Sunmudo demonstrations performed by some of the black belt monks and participated in Barugongyang (a traditional Buddhist meal) where the principle of “cleaning your plate” took on a whole new meaning.  You start with four bowls – one for rice, one for soup, one for kimchi/ accompaniments and one for “pure water.”  You must clean the spice out of a piece of kimchi in your soup and set it to the side of your rice bowl.  After finishing your meal (we were told not to eat faster than 5 minutes, but under no circumstances to take longer than 10), you are responsible for making sure not a single grain of food is left in any of the three bowls.  At the end of the meal, a monk comes around to pour hot water into your rice bowl.  You the use the kimchi as a rag to clean it then you transfer the water and kimchi to the soup bowl and repeat.  When you finish this process you drink the liquid containing the remaining food tidbits.  Finally, you transfer the “pure water” into the rice bowl, then soup bowl, then accompaniment bowl and perform a final rinsing using your fingers.  The monk collects this water in a bucket when everyone finishes.  If anyone pours water containing food into the bucket, the contents of the entire bucket are redistributed to everyone for drinking: an etiquette point for which the monks were forgiving.  When the Spaniard next to Juan poured his dirty ass water into the bucket the shocked monk unsuccessfully tried to stop him, then shamefacedly presented it to the head monk who laughed and permitted him to throw it away.  Funny (and lucky for us) we didn’t have to sip people’s backwash…

We really enjoyed our four days here, but it was a cruel wake-up call.  Our bodies are not in great shape and the month of kung fu training we’ve signed up for in May might be rough.

*Speaking of which, he knew a lot of different ways to say “flex your butt” for someone whose first language isn’t English (e.g. “contract your anus”, “tighten your rectum”).