After spending a month in or "closed" country, I'm sure you all are wondering where we were and what we did. Therefore, I will write a detailed blog series describing just that. This is the first of a series so stay tuned for more!
How do I begin to describe where we were in the month of October? I will start by describing what we went through to get there, because it is a LONG story! We arrived in Hong Kong after a flight from Manila in the Philippines and we immediately boarded a tour bus to cross the border into China. It was a fun bus ride and we got to see a lot of Hong Kong. It was funny to be there because they drive on the left side of the road and once we crossed the border, we started driving on the right side of the road. We were on this bus for about 5 hours and had to get off and on to go through customs.
Our bus driver dropped us off at the train station and our squad was all going to split up from there and board trains that went separate directions to the cities that we were going to do ministry in. Two of the teams had very little time to board the train so they were running around the train station trying to figure out how to get tickets and where to go, which was already very chaotic, but then we finally found out that we had been dropped off at the wrong train station! Chris (one of our squad's logistics leaders) did a great job at finding out how to get to the right train station and everyone was able to get on their trains on time.
This incident seemed to set the tone for how our traveling would go from there on out. It was very difficult to get around in China because we couldn't read any of the signs and we couldn't speak any of the language. I have an entire new appreciation for foreigners in the U.S. and I vow to always try to help them find out where they are going.
We finally boarded the train after eating dinner at McDonald's (I had a spicy chicken sandwich and it was REALLY spicy! I was crying while eating it! They do not take the term "spicy" lightly in this country!). We had the option to take the seats that AIM would pay for us to have, or we could chip in our personal money to upgrade to beds for the train ride. Chris and I chose to sit in seats for the entirety of the 31 hour train ride. I'm not sure what we were thinking, but next time I will gladly upgrade to beds! We boarded the train at about midnight and got as much sleep as we could the two nights we spent sitting on the train. We finally arrived in our destination city! When we found our way out of the train station, we were greeted by our contact and given a sheet of paper describing where we were going to go for the month and what our ministry would involve. We chose to spend the day resting in the city that we had rived in after our long days of traveling and we would leave the following morning to get to our final place where we would stay for the month (from here on out it will be called No Man's Land, which seems appropriate because that is how the city was described to us).
We arose early on October 14 (my birthday) to finish our traveling and finally get to where we were going. We boarded a bus and started out on what we thought would be a 3 hour bus trip to No Man's Land. After about 3 hours of traveling we switched busses and sat in a creepy parking lot of a few hours and then rode our second bus for about 3 more hours down a dirt road that seemed like it was under construction the whole way! We went through the mountains and many small villages and it rally seemed like we were in the middle of nowhere until out of the blue there was a rather large city that we stopped in. Everyone got off the bus, so we assumed that this was where we were supposed to be. We had finally made it to No Man's Land! We showed the bus driver the name of the hotel that had been recommended to us and he gave us a funny look and offered us 50 yuan back. He never pointed us in the direction of the hotel, so we set out on foot to find someone else to ask where we were supposed to go. We asked many people on the streets where our hotel was, and they looked at us and laughed, but no one pointed us in any direction! Finally we realized what was going on…. we weren't in the right city! After searching around we found a cab that said he would take us to the city that we wanted to go. We plied all 6 of our packs in the back seat and shared the remaining 4 seats between the 6 of us and went on our merry way. We rode over more mountains on a road that seemed in even more disarray than the first one and we even went through a snowstorm but finally, 45 minutes later, we arrived in No Man's Land!
This city was very strange. It was the strangest place that I have ever been! I couldn't believe that we made it to this city without speaking the language or being able to read any signs. That fact alone showed God's awesomeness and that He was in control of the situation. We found the hotel that had been described to us and settled in for the night after traveling for about 9 hours that day. We went out for a big team dinner that night to celebrate my birthday and ordered something that looked like delicious sweet and sour chicken… but it turned out to be pure cartilage that was breaded and fried. So we retreated for the night, bound to find out more about No Man's Land the following day.
