Enter the Monkey

Last night, in a fit of ambition, my roommate, good friend and I attended a martial arts class at a nearby ... um, what would you call it? Dojo? Studio? We all have our own motivations, but my personal agenda was to complete the official Asian stereotype (you know, math, music, and martial arts) and see if I couldn't activate some of those latent Asian kick-trash genes that I know run in my bloodstream.

After the few sundry items of business: form filling, introductions, etc etc, we then proceeded to the warm-up room, where the master of the dojo/studio herded us towards his students with the instruction of "Here. Teach them something."

What followed was a mish-mash of attempted 'evasive turns', kicks, punches, et al, the juxtaposition of three semi-coordinated girls amongst many black-gi clad *manly* men ironic to say the least. In our final run-through with said master, when I demonstrated my "spinning turn number one", he cocked his head and queried, "do you take the ball-let?" Apparently my turn was a little too twirly for him.

*note: I almost forgot to include that while music was playing in the background for the duration of class, the few minutes spent with the master were set to a techno-remix of the Chicken Dance. I kid you not.*

It all culminated in a five minute kicking session where we lined up and, yep, took turns kicking each other. (They didn't actually teach us kicks. Imagine the ignominy...) The best moment, though, was when one of my improvised flying roundhouse kicks landed squarely on the brown-belted chest of my opponent, knocking him unconscious and garnering the lavish praise of everyone else in the room.

...Okay that last part didn't actually happen. But it sure was a fun night.