It only hurts when I laugh

After a long and hectic week here on the Sias campus, yesterday (Sunday) really was a day of rest.

I decided not to set an alarm, and so just woke naturally around 8:15 or so. I’ve been reading ‘The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared’ for the last week or so, and so I decided to stay in bed until I finished it.

I had agreed to meet with the World Academy Media team at 10am, and so I picked up breakfast on the run, and headed over to the Administration team. There were too many of us to comfortably sit around a table, so we took the large puzzle-piece mats that the students use for the reading program, and camped out in the hall. We spent a long time going over what makes a story newsworthy, and also going through the different audiences for the WAFW website and newsletter, and what their expectations are. We wrapped up by collectively writing and editing a blog post about Susanna’s project feeding hungry children in poor rural areas with Henan province. My goal is to teach the students to use WordPress and have them regularly posting news items and producing a weekly newsletter before I leave at the beginning of next month.

After our meeting ended, I joined the students in walking over to the ‘Castle’ to grab lunch. I wasn’t really hungry, but there is an excellent coffee shop over there, which I was all too happy to support. Over lunch, the students wanted to interview me for their newsletter, but as they weren’t sure what questions to ask, it was more like interviewing myself.

This is how I pictured my massage.

After lunch, it was time to head off campus for the massage that Gloria had scheduled for me. When I was still trying to get over the remnants of flu last week, I was really achy, and felt that a massage would really help. I wasn’t able to get it scheduled then, so now I was really looking forward to it. My co-facilitator Susan also decided that a massage sounded like a good idea, so the two of us set off with Gloria and Carina. When we got there, it was a little bit unsettling to learn that they were planning to have us both get our massages in the same room and at the same time. Thinking that Chinese massages would be something like massages everywhere else, I explained that that wasn’t going to work for us, so they scurried around and found me another room.

This is how my massage felt.

I have to say that this was probably the most unusual massage experience that I’ve ever had (or maybe on a par with me getting 2nd degree burns from the hot rock massage that I had in Los Banos a couple of years ago). First of all, there wasn’t any massage table. Instead there was an oversized and overstuffed chaise-type chair that I was told to lay down on. I’d started to undress when I first went into the room, but I quickly realized that removing just my cufflinks was about as far as I needed to go, as the masseuse / all-in wrestler started to massage me through my clothes.

What she lacked in style or finesse, she more than made up for in eagerness and sheer brute strength. Her technique seemed to focus on accupressure points, starting with trying to squeeze my ten-gallon head into a five-gallon space. I’m not sure how long the massage lasted, but given the punishment that I took, it felt like I’d gone at least 15 rounds with a world title contender. I asked Gloria and Carina afterwards, and they said that they could clearly hear the sound of me being slapped through the door.

I do have to say though, that while the best part of the massage was when it came to an end, I did sleep like a baby last night, waking up feeling refreshed (albeit a little bruised and battered) this morning.