I tried to make it out to Foshan the day after coming back from Zhongshan, but as I mentioned before I struggled a little. And I found out that the GuangFo metro line wasn't under construction after all so I didn't need the bus. Three metro stops from where I was staying and I was at the end of metro line 1 and the beginning of the GuangFo line that took me to Zu Miao. My only real concrete plans were to go to the Nan Feng dragon kiln (there are three left in China and Foshan has the oldest one, it's over 500 years old) and possibly catch an opera performance at 2pm at Zu Miao temple.Since it was still pretty early, I wandered a bit to find my bus and head out to the kiln first. It took a while for it to register just how big the twin kilns were (30 meters). It's still in use too. Anyway, since traveling to Cortona I seem to have made a habit of picking up a ceramic item wherever I go and the area around the kiln was definitely the place to do that. I resisted for a while and found myself back at the window of one particular shop eyeing the zodiac teapots. So I am now the proud owner of a small sheep teapot. It's been my one big purchase thus far aside from getting a violin in ZhuZhou. I'd have loved to stay longer but I also get the feeling that I could have spent a lot of time just staring at tea cups so I took one last walk around the kiln and the surrounding area and caught the bus back to Zu Miao.

Zu Miao temple was a bit of a strange place for me. It was kind of an all in one culture and heritage site where you could light incense to Bei Di (the north god), watch some Cantonese opera, check out tributes to Ip Man and Wong Fei Huang, see some dancing and kung fu demonstrations, look at woodcarvings, visit a Confucian temple, look at an old boat, and buy Foshan's famous paper art. It was fun and Cantonese opera actually wasn't quite as unbearable as I wondered about (to my ears anyway). It definitely drew an older crowd. I've been told that interest in Chinese opera has been fading, and that the experience of going to Chinese opera is quite different from what we'd expect during a Western opera. People who go to such shows are usually familiar with the work and the stories so they just kind of wander out for a smoke and come back for their favorite parts. But it was a good way for me see it at a relatively cheap price without having to pay for a whole show in the opera house (and possibly find that the highly stylized movements, singing, and face makeup was hard for me to take).

It has been a busy week since I last posted. As I mentioned before, orientation has been intensive but I am really happy to have that support, guidance, and network with me as I find my footing around here. I have started having more moments when people turn to me and start speaking rapid Mandarin so that I can translate for others and one moment where a confused boy said I wasn't American but I haven't been bitter about any of them. I guess my time at Franklin served me well in many ways. At least I won't have to worry about weird men yelling "Hey China!" out here.

Anyway, to get to the more positive side of this past week (since my experience thus far has been nearly all positive) I got the opportunity to visit Kaifu Temple (開福寺). I'm not wholly sure what kind of temple it was, there were 3 Buddhas you could ask blessings from and towards the back it seemed like a row of 7 or 8 gods of luck. At least, the elderly man holding a peach was very familiar. All the detail is incredible, and it has to be the first temple I've walked into with colorful electric lights inside. Unfortunately, I don't have many good pictures of the inside of the temple as people were there praying, chanting, and going through a number of rituals around me. I didn't feel wholly comfortable with the idea of walking into a group of people and taking photos of their religious spaces when they were using them.

It was certainly a different side of China than what I had seen walking around YOME, YiZhong, and Martyr's Park. There were many stands for telling fortunes, selling incense, and a lot of people begging in front of the gates. One of the volunteers gave money to one of the beggars in front of the temple and we all got swarmed as a result which was a little overwhelming at first though they left when we made it clear we were moving on.

After our visit we had to come in for lesson plan debriefs, but it was nice to have a day that was more free than any since we've arrived. We're starting practicum on Tuesday and I'm nervous to actually be in front of the classroom and to see how well my lesson plans will work, but as I said before I'm glad that the field director and assistant field director have done such a good job of pushing us on towards working in an actual classroom before releasing us. Now that I'm more used to the process and we've spent so much time going over discipline and enforcing a good learning environment I'm much more confident and aware of the things I can do as an authority figure. I did take a little time to ask for a good academic year so I suppose even my free time is going into my job.

Some of the advice we received during our first week was to write down a China moment of the day. I haven't wholly figured out what makes a moment a China moment, but I can say that today was the first time I witnessed a man drive past on his motorbike with all these live chickens and geese clucking and honking from the back where they were hanging upside down. I can also say that today when I gestured toward a family and told them they had beautiful children, one of the mothers ran her thumb over my arm and felt out all the hairs since my arm wasn't completely covered. I'm nearly two weeks into this and I feel like I've taken in so little even though I've done well at finding my way thus far.