The horse nuzzled my shoulder

... someone felt compelled to inform me today in big letters screaming from his chest. Either that's some cultural reference totally lost on me, or someone is having a lot of fun selling these kids shirts with random English stuff on it. Or what's up with "Three plus one equals five"? Is ignorance really the message you want to send when you walk around a university campus? Or maybe this is some very subtle way of criticizing the Chinese educational system? Speaking of which, when planning my class (I'm going to teach "Geometry and Topology for Physicists" again), I was told not to schedule it for Tueday or Thursday after lunch, because that's when the mandatory classes "The socialism of physics" and "Scientific method and Marxism" or something along those lines are held. Just in case you were wondering how "socialist" China still is. LingFei was kind of laughing when he translated that for me. I don't want to bring up another GDR-analogy, but those of you who grew up there probably catch my meaning.

Today's duck story is totally fake. I mean, there was fake duck - in the Buddhist temple where I had lunch. The picture on the menu (a funny aside - the menu covers were in Russian!) didn't look all that compelling (it resembled the cold duck meat appetizer, which I wasn't in the mood for), so I went for the fake eel instead. It was pretty good. Didn't taste fishy at all, but I liked what they had done with the texture. There were little rolls of tofu skin and mushrooms (the latter making this tasty), wrapped with crispy seaweed, which gave a pretty good imitation of the crispy fried skin of an eel. And the tofu-skin-mushroom mixture had an interesting fibered texture, pretty close to fish meat, not so close to fatty eel maybe. But I have no complaints. Ok, one maybe - the sauce was a bit generic. Can't even tell you what it was. A bit like fish fragrant (ginger, garlic), but with something red and sweet in it. But the really great thing about this lunch was the location. The restaurant is on top of the hill on which Jiming temple sits and the view was just spectacular. Over the City Walls (on which I wandered around for half an hour or so without encountering any other person - it's a quiet oasis of overgrown stones from the Ming dynasty, built 1366-1386, two thirds of its originally 33km still standing, which makes it the longest city wall ever built worldwide, at least according to Lonely Planet) onto Xuanwu Lake (which is also a big park, or rather the islands in it are). Jiming temple (鸡鸣寺 = rooster crowing temple) is the biggest active Buddhist temple in Nanjing and there were quite a few worshippers there today. Surprisingly (at least to me) most of them were young people. The temple has about six different halls with big golden Buddha or other Deity statues in them. Most buildings in their current form seem to be from 1984 and many of the statues were donated by Thailand. There is also an impressive gift shop, which shows you what the junk you get in Chinatown as souvenirs should look like :) There was some nice jewellery and impressive amber and jade carvings. I didn't ask for prices, but I somehow got the feeling at least the gemstones were genuine (and I guess the monks (into whose housing courtyard I accidentally wandered - oops - thankfully nobody saw me) spend their days carving those gemstones while tourists invade their holy halls?). I can't tell if it's a place for rip-off. I saw some tourists buying stuff, but they were all Chinese tourists! Today was another Caucasian free day, even though I ended my walking tour in a Costa Coffee shop, paying 25yuan (=$4) for a "ka bu qi nuo" (sorry, I don't remember which characters they used, I'll copy them down next time). They are so nice there. Even before I can tell them I want "一小杯 yi xiao bei" (a small cup), they ask me "for here or to go?" I really have to find out what a teapuccino is - but it's a pricey experiment. Do I really wan to spend 30yuan on it? Maybe the Mangofresco sounds more promising...