What is Gung Fu? I know what Kung Fu is.
Gung Fu is the original Chinese pronounciation of it. Kung Fu is the Americanized version.
As for your story about being trained by a true Shaolin monk, well, Shaolin as taught in China right now is very closely guarded. They teach 'wushu' more than the original Shaolin of old.
I myself was taught Northern Shaolin by an old vietnamese guy, who himself was taught by a Shaolin monk who fled China during the cultural revolution. He didn't speak English, and i didn't speak Vietnamese, so it was ackward, but i managed to live with him and he taught me everyday for a little over 2 years. Prior to him, i was in a westernized school that supposedly taught 5 Animals Shaolin Kung Fu... but after an hour with the vietnamese master, i knew what i had been taught for those years were entirely false.
As for competitions... i don't think they offer what you're interested in. The competitions are extremely formal and regid. Kung Fu competitions do have a little more freedom than others when it comes to the forms... but even then, i don't even remember exactly how grading is done.
And just out of curiosity, what's "real Kung Fu" and what's the hokey sh!t that you mentioned? Any specific styles you'd like to mention?
Well, i can't speak for LordRaiden, but i knew within an hour of training with the Vietnamese master that all my other teaching was false. The very first sequence of moves he taught me, was already focused on maiming or killing an enemy. The style i was taught, had 12 levels. With the last 2 being weapons. Each level had approximately 5-7 moves only. Really, really simple moves as well. Nothing fancy. Every attack was meant to disable an opponent, whether it was throat, groin, hair pulling, joints, etc. The next level, always held the counterattack to the previous level. So for example, level 2, held all the counterattacks for level 1, but also new attacks for level 2. That went all the way till 10, where Dragon style had no counterattack (level 9 was monkey). You know how some of the old chinese gung fu movies, where they yell out their styles of attack, or if you recognize it, and you had an appropriate style to defend, you would see them spar back and forth, back and forth? That's exactly how it is. Level 3 has a jump in kick attack to the chin, and level 4 has a counterattack to that where you step aside and block the kick, but also an attack of your own to the kidney. When my master and i sparred, that's how it was... we would jump back and forth, left and right, attack, counter attack, attack, counter attack, etc.
I only learned up to level 6 before i left him... he wanted to teach me everything before i left, since he wanted to pass on the knowledge to somebody. But living with him was tiring me. I was young, and he was your traditional master. I did daily chores for him, made him dinner, cleaned his dishes, floors, did chores for him, etc, etc. So i wanted to leave quickly, and i was tired of training. Of course now that i looked back on it, i highly regretted not learning everything when i had the chance. I can't name you the exact styles and moves, since he didn't speak English, and i didn't speak Vietnamese... we had a Vietnamese-English dictionary that we used a lot, but most of the moves were too poetic to translate literally. Moves were called like "Axeman comes home", and involved pulling the hair back to expose the neck, and breaking the trachea (like somebody chopping an axe). Or Five Dragons, which was a series of fast attack that emulate the attack of 5 dragons. Level 3, or Circle 3 as he called it, was named The Flower, because when you looked at somebody doing the entire sequence from above, and if he did it correctly, you would see a flower drawn in the dirt from his feet movements.
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