Broke through the wall!
Well sorry I haven’t been posting. Once I got on to mainland China, OntheMat.com was blocked. Along with Facebook and Youtube. Dam commies. LOL
But I got OntheMat.com unblocked, so here I am. It’s been fun here and been a bit crazy. We took a long 4 hour bus ride to the hotel the night before we went to the expo show. The crazy thing is you have to go through customs twice. Once leaving the Hong Kong area and then you get back on the bus for a quick ride and then again going in to China. A really funny thing is how people try to run and push their way through the lines. But it is a race to no where since your bus can not leave til everyone is on it. So we had all these short Chinese ladies pushing by us just to have to wait for us on the other side. Joke was on them I guess.
One thing here you can’t believe is how much and where people smoke. People will smoke anywhere at any time. Nonstop chain smoking seems to be the style everyone does. The smoking in the restaurants really gets to me, looking over and seeing people with chop sticks in one hand and a cigarette in the other is gross. But everyone seems to just eat and smoke at the same time.
The other place it really gets me is smoking in the elevator. I feel like i am trapped in a smoke coffin. It is just gross.
I got a really great massage here the other night. It was a two hour massage for only $7.00 and it was a really good massage too. And, sorry guys not a happy ending massage, just a really good hard massage. It is amazing those little girls can get so much power.
A lot of people think that China is all child labor sweat shop factories and I have yet to see anything like that. They are all very clean and modern factories. No kids in any of them, other than the owner’s son running around in one. In fact, I have seen much worse sewing shops in downtown L.A. than I have here so far.
We went out to the bar for a minute the other night on our walk back from dinner. But was a smokey place playing a lot of U.S. only music and a lot of music in English I have never heard before. The best part was they had Chinese MMA on all the TV’s and people seemed to be in to it.
I thought the level of fighting would be low, but it was really good. There was a lot of grappling and a few of the fights ended in submissions. One guy had a great OG Gracie Jiu-Jitsu style takedown, pass, mount to armlock. Looked really good. They also had 3 girls matches on and the girls were really good. Some were a lot better than I have seen in the USA. So I think we can look to see some future MMA stars coming out of China.
They do definitely need some better gear. The gloves looked awful and it looked like everyone just wore whatever shorts they usually go to the gym in. One guy had on long pants Aoki style. He also had a good guard.
More to come!