Jingdezhen is the porcelain capital of China. Pottery has been made here for over 1700 years. As mentioned before, many of the street lamps and traffic lights are made entirely out of china, and there are whole streets with nothing but china shops. At first this didn't interest me at all, it had even started to become rather irritating to constantly here about the fucking porcelain, as if anyone has actually heard of Jingdezhen it is namely because of this.
Then last Sunday we invited a student over to our flat and she surprised us by bringing two large boxes - one for each of us - containg an entire coffee set made out of the finest porcelain.
We had then promised a students mother that we would give her son private lessons, but as we had refused pay she insisted on taking us to her porcelain store and had us pick out anything we wanted. That same night we went home with a tea set and some plates.
We have since also had two other students promise to bring us some china, because they have a family member who owns a shop. Everyone here knows someone who owns a porcelain shop, and they are incredibly generous with it. All this has lead me to really love the porcelain, the stretlamps really are quite beautiful, and they make the otherwise unintersting city quite picturesque in my eyes.
People are reasonably used to foreigners around here, again due to the porcelain, which attracts many students and teachers alike. Still, this doesn't mean that we don't attract a small amount of attention, and have shouts of 'Hellooo' and 'Meiguoren, Meiguoren' ('American, American') trailing after us. On a good day this doesn't matter, on a bad one this can be quite irritating. People tend to assume that you are either French or American, as there are a few students and professors from there over here, working at the porcelain university or the Jingdezhen University. Despite this considerable amount of foreigners, we only ever see any when we go to KFC, somewhere we have gone too many times for my liking because students always insist on taking us there again and again. We always avoid them as best we can, although we secretly want to speak to them. But seeing as we are almost always with some Chinese people when we see them it would be odd to leave them to go and talk to foreigners.
