Practice in Prospect Park

For the last three days I've been practicing Chen style taijiquan in Prospect Park. On the first day I went to the top of the hill overlooking the lake (which I've named Tai Ji Hill) early in the morning, around 6:30 a.m. What do you know, the old Chinese people were there to greet me. (Why are old Chinese people so active?? It's great! We should all get in the habit of practicing early in the morning. If you think you can't do it, just ask yourself, who's tougher, you or a 65-year-old Chinese grandma? Actually forget it, the Chinese grandma will kick your ass any day.)

The next day was on the baseball infields around 10 a.m. If you've never done it, do yourself the favor of practicing martial arts on a baseball infield, or any bit of packed red earth. It's solid yet much more forgiving than wood or concrete, and the dust swirls satisfyingly around your feet as you practice.

Today it was raining, so I went to the Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment, which is housed in Tai Ji Pavilion West (as I've named it) inside Prospect Park, a few blocks from the 7th Avenue F train station. It's a marble structure that looks like some sort of Roman temple. The windowless offices are at either end, leaving me the middle for practice. As I started my second set, two women came out of the offices. One was a young asian woman, and the other was an older black woman. The younger woman was upset about something and burst into tears as she tried to explain something to the other woman, who I'm guessing was her supervisor. I did my best to ignore them.