China!

Well simply put China was an amazing month; our team spent our time in a small town surrounded by mountains in Western China.  Here is an abridged version of some of the things we did this month:

• Took 6 modes of transportation to get to our town: a 2hr bus ride-a 2 hour plane ride-a 4 hour bus ride-a 36 hour train ride-a taxi ride-and a final 4 hour bus ride–I really didn’t know where I was in China until about week 2
• Helped take orders in an English café
• Met people from around the world (Holland, France, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany)
• Did prayer walks through the monastery
• Made friends with monks and nuns
• Sat up on a hill overlooking the city and prayed over the town each day
• Almost got attacked by a Yak on the mountain
• Taught English to a police officer from 7-9 each night
• Made friends with the town people but could never understand their names so we renamed them very creatively (vest man, bakery girl, hat man, fruit man, sock man)
• Ate delicious (but spicy) noodle dishes everyday
• Had to pray that someone else in the restaurant would get something good so we could point at it, since we couldn’t read or understand Chinese
• Played a lot of charades since we didn’t understand A THING
• Had a dance party in the courtyard of our hotel
• Jess saw snow for the first time and we had a snow fight
• Climbed a mountain with our friend from the hotel
• Got to know peoples amazing stories
• Began to truly understand what it means to be free in America and that so many people dream of simply seeing America once in their lifetime
• Took another 20 hour train ride to Beijing, slept on the floor beneath nice Chinese people and ate sun flower seeds with a woman who never stopped smiling
• Saw the Great Wall, the forbidden city and the silk market
• Survived month 2 and arrived in Cape Town, South Africa after 45 hours of travel

 
Thank you for all of your prayers over this last month, I’m excited to be able to blog again!