Our main coordinator has a friend named Alan who drives some of the teachers to school everyday to practice his English. On Tuesday he wanted to take us out for lunch as a thank you! He took us to a Buddhist temple he works at in Zhongshan! After school on Tuesday we all meet him at this Buddhist temple. Walking up to the temple there were a lot of homeless people begging us white girls for money. Homeless people here are significantly more homeless looking than in the States. Majority of them have some sort of a severe physical disability and make me feel bad I can't give them a million bucks each. When we walked in the temple a ceremony had just ended. Inside the temple there were three massive golden Buddha's with several different God's all along the walls.  Monks were walking around and people were worshiping the God's on their stoles everywhere. Once we explored the temple we were taken to another temple where we were seated for lunch. We ate lunch INSIDE the temple! We had people worshiping around us and had Buddhist God's staring at us while we "ate". We were served 10 different dishes and we knew nothing that was on each of those dishes. Alan informed us later we were eating mushrooms, seaweed, tofu, peanuts, kelp and a few other things I can't remember. Alan told us that because Buddhists are vegetarians some of the dishes are made to look like meat. The lunch we ate had two dishes that looked like chicken and steak but tasted far from it. I did try everything but only ate about a bite of it. Thank goodness for rice! I only had rice to cover up the bad taste of the food, because of course they did not provide water. Only a bad tasting tea. This was one of those meals where girls were pretending to eat and shoving food in their purses haha! After lunch Alan chatted with me about his religion. His English is mediocre so I couldn't understand everything he said, but I was able to learn some interesting things about Buddhism. Alan would get so excited when I asked him questions about his religion and I understood what he was saying. It was a really cool experience!