Today was the first day of the competition and included a series of individual forms. (The group forms are tomorrow.) We met at 6am on one of the racquetball courts in the hotel to run through the forms we had prepared and then enjoyed another amazing breakfast buffet. We climbed on a bus about 8am and were driven to the competition site, a large elementary school gym about 45 minutes from the hotel.

After the welcoming ceremony, empty hand Hsing-I forms were performed first. It was exciting and helpful to see the other schools perform so many of the familiar Cheng Ming forms.

There were five members of our school that had prepared individual forms, Megan, Jane, John, Chinako and Constance, and we had all selected weapons forms. The weapons forms began after the empty hand forms finished around 11am. Chinako and Jane both did Tai Chi Sword, Megan and Constance did Hsing-I Stick and Sword, Megan and John did Goro Staff, and John did Jun Yang Sword. We were all happy with our performances and also relieved to have them completed. There were over 150 individual performances that had to be completed today and everything ran very smoothly. There were three different performance areas and each area was scored by three judges, so there were multiple performances going on at once.

The last portion of the afternoon was reserved for Ba Gua empty hand forms and there were some truly beautiful performances.

We all climbed on the buses to go to dinner at a nearby restaurant and had another great meal of multiple courses. Every table’s lazy Susan was working overtime to handle all the great food.

I think we’d all be willing to bet on getting some sleep tonight!