Sounds kinda like “seafood” but without the “d”. And the “u” is pretty drawn out. See-fOOOO. My Malaysian friend Kevin made us pronounce it, like, eighteen times on our way to meet him. He told us that Sifu means “master” and they call him that because he is, well, the master. The master of Chinese massage. He told us that getting a massage from him is better than sex.

Ummmm….awkward?

On the way into Sifu’s home Kevin said “oh, and by the way, you might come out a little red. And then tomorrow you might be all black and blue”.

Wait, what? I thought we were going for a relaxing Chinese massage? The best in Malaysia. Done by the master, Sifu.

He told us that his kind of massage is great for improving circulation and that if we are healthy we wouldn’t get that many black and blues. Adam and I like to think of ourselves as relatively healthy. We eat salads regularly, both of us eat a high protein breakfast, and we drink water 95% of the time. Either we aren’t as healthy as we thought, or this Chinese circulation massage stuff is a bunch of hogwash.

I …*ahem* …allowed Adam the privilege of going first. He had never had a “real” massage before so I thought I’d give him first dibs on Sifu’s awesomeness. That, or I wanted to see how “red” he would be afterwards, just in case I decided to back out. He came out one hour later, face red as scarlet and I asked to see his back. It literally looked like a car ran him over. Eight times. And then ran him over once more. He was already black and blue. I said “OH MY GOSH, it looks like you got run over my a semi!”, to which he responded “It feels that way too”.

Against my better judgement, I followed after him into one of the rooms of Sifu’s home. For one solid hour he worked on improving the circulation of my veins. Or something like that. All I know is that it hurt. A lot. When I came back out one hour later I wasn’t as red as Adam, but still red all the same.

Bottom line: don’t ever trust a man who’s name you have to pronounce eighteen times before getting it right.

I have no point in writing this post except to have something to look back on years from now and laugh at the memory we have of Sifu. The following two pictures will definitely be making it into an 8×8, leather bound flushmount album from this trip. 🙂