Zumiao Temple

I live next door to Guan Hua Kindergarten's Principle, Ling something something (I have no idea how to say it, let alone spell it) and this morning she showed me how to work the washing machine, then the kitchen appliances - we have an electric hob which looks like a set of scales - then she gave me a weird pink fruit. The outside was like a dusty pink, and when you cut it open the skin just underneath the surface was fluorescent pink, and the inside was white with loads of little black seeds dotted about. Ling told me the Chinese name (which, naturally, I've forgotten) and I'm not sure of the English one. Maybe Dragon Fruit, I think that exists. Ling's sort of adopting me, she doesn't speak much English, but she's really lovely and has a daughter whose about my age. I'm not complaining, it means I can work the cooking-scales.

So after all the pink-fruit antics, I decided to do some more exploring. I went to Zumiao Temple, which means 'temple of the Ancestors' but apparently only because it's the oldest one in Foshan. It was awesome! Unfortunately I don't have a camera, so the photo In the corner is just a Google one. It's of the front gate to the temple from the outside. When you first walk into the grounds, on your left is a huge wing chun museum. It was amazing. There were two guys practicing on this little courtyard in the middle of this massive ancient Chinese temple, I felt like I was in a Bruce Lee film or something. All around the temple there were loads of wooden and stone carvings of lions and dragons, and golden Buddha statues with incense burning that people were bowing to as they walked past. There was also a big gold statue of some guy, the sign (some of them were in English for us foreigners) said that it was a made up emperor based on the God of the north. They had two cannons dating back to the opium wars, which is really weird because I've just been reading about this war in The Rings of Saturn. I felt all knowledgeable. But also like a bit of a dick because I'm British. There were carvings of foreigners looking like deformed dwarfs because they disliked us so much!

There was a massive pond FILLED with coy carp and turtles, and had hundreds of dragonflies buzzing around, and incense sticks burning. It was beautiful. There was a statue of a turtle with a snake on its back in the middle of the pond, as well as two trees on pillars, and people were chucking money onto them. Somewhere else in the temple there was this massive tree, which looked normal from a distance, but when you walk under it, if you look up, there hundreds of red cards with gold writing and little plastic satsumas attached to them. Sounds weird, I know, but there is a point to the plastic fruit. The satsuma is filled with water to weight it, so that you throw the whole thing up in the air and it catches on one of the branches. I have no idea why, as there weren't any English signs by the tree. Because this is a fairly touristy place - as shown by the English signs - I wasn't stared at as much. Either that or I'm just getting used to it. I think I even saw another white person. But, saying that I did have some guy ask (mime) to have his picture taken with me.

I came back on a motorbike taxi again, but I got there by bus - despite not knowing the city or the language, aren't I clever? I got in and cooked some dumplings. These were just frozen ones from a supermarket (same as the kind you can get in the UK) so they weren't as nice as the fresh ones. A lady called Dudu - don't laugh - took Glenn, Amanda and me out for lunch the other day and we had these dumplings which each had 3 fresh shrimp inside, they were so frigging tasty! So I sat back with my dumplings, a beer and watched the wire before a massive thunderstorm started and caught my attention. Lovely.