Country-side Adventure

Tomorrow Mike will be leaving for two weeks to go on a country side adventure. He will be traveling to a small southern city to share with people that have not had the opportunity to hear the Father's name and many probably have not seen a foreign face before. He and some of the volunteers that are here will get a brief orientation and then they will be given a map and a bus ticket and be sent on their way. When I think of "the ends of the earth" these are the kinds of places I think of. Here are a few of the obstacles that the team might be facing may include but are not limited to...

- new and "special" Cuisine
- Rustic accommodations
- Minimal direction
- Few to no English speakers (go go gadget Chinese Language)
- Many who may not understand standard Chinese
- HOT weather
- 30 hour train rides

The cool things though is that the place if full of beautiful mountains and caves and the chance to shed some light in a place that has been wandering aimlessly in the dark for decades. Please keep Mike in your minds as he embarks on his journey and me and i hold down the fort alone for the next couple of weeks. Thanks so much for all you who are reading this and supporting us.

Why Don't They Speak Spanish In China?

Em and I often wish that Chinese people spoke Spanish. We both took some in high school, and even though we don't remember a lot whenever our Mexican/Spanish classmates begin to rattle off some Spanish we totally understand so much more than Chinese, even after living in China for a year.

I recently got a facebook message from an exchange student who came to our place back in my junior year of high school. It goes like this:

Hola! Estas buscando un sobresueldo? Estoy trabajando ya durante 2 meses en las horas libres del trabajo principal a favor de una compania grande. En el mes pasado he cobrado 2.470 euros. Ellos siguen buscando colaboradores. Si necesitas un trabajo adicional, envia su breve resumen (nombre, apellidos, pais de residencia, ciudad, edad, telefono de contacto) a la direccion: buenos suerte!!!!

Even if you don't speak Spanish you can probably get what is going on. Linguists say 60% of English and Spanish have some crossover to them, but Chinese and English, 2%. Check out the translation in Chinese:

你好! 寻找额外付款的这些？ 我在主要工作的自由小时内已经工作在2个月期间倾向于一家大公司。 在上个月我接受了2,470欧元。 他们持续寻找合作。 如果您需要另外的工作，它寄发它的简单的概要(命名，姓，住所，城市，年龄国家，我打电话联络)到方向：[在电子邮件方向请消灭空间]
好运!

Ok, so the characters might not be a fair representation, so I'll translate it into the alphabetical form of Chinese called "pinyin."

nǐhǎo xúnzhǎo éwài fùkuǎn dì / de / dí zhèxiē wǒ zài zhǔyào gōngzuò dì / de / dí zìyóu xiǎoshí nèi yǐjīng gōngzuò zài gè yuè qījiān qīngxiàng yú yī jiā dài / dà gōngsī zài shàng gè yuè wǒ jiēshòu liǎo / le ōuyuán tāmen chíxù xúnzhǎo hézuò rúguǒ nín xūyào lìngwài dì / de / dí gōngzuò tā jì fā / fà tāde jiǎndān dì / de / dí gàiyào mìngmíng xìng zhù suǒ chéngshì niánlíng guójiā wǒ dǎdiànhuà liánluò dào fāngxiàng dào dào huòzhě huò / hé huò huò huò zài diànzǐyóujiàn fāngxiàng qǐng xiāomiè kōngjiān.

There's not a word that even starts with the same letter! If only they spoke Spanish in China...

Was Honest Abe Really Honest?

This has nothing to do with our marriage...but is stinkin hilarious.

PB&J Expectations

Lately I've been really thankful that I moved here "sight unseen." Sure it was a little unnerving committing to live in an unknown place for two years, and it made packing difficult, but overall I'd say ignorance was bliss.

It seems like it would be really hard to come to the same country twice. Once you've been someplace you establish certain ideas about how your next trip will be and when things are different it would be hard to adjust. (I also think it's easier to be teachable when you clearly know nothing about what you are doing.)

It's like a boy and his mom. Everyday for lunch his mom makes him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich cut diagonally, just the way the boy likes it. Well one day he has a babysitter and instead of his pb&j sliced diagonally it's folded in half. The ingredients haven't changed, peanut butter, jelly, bread... but it's just not the same peanut butter and jelly that he has come to know and love. And the only thing he can think is "my mom doesn't do it that way." There's nothing wrong with the way the babysitter makes the sandwich, it's just not what he expected.

Why Do Guys Do Stupid Stuff?

I was having a conversation recently with Emily's Uncle Dave about how guys are always doing stupid stuff just to see how manly they are. Like carrying too many or too heavy things at once just to see how much I can do. Trying to fix things at heights that could lead to paralysis while on the top rung of a ladder. Or fixing important parts of appliances with duct tape, because it works and it's cheap. I have always done things like that and most of the time it's not in competition with anyone else, just myself competing with myself saying, "I bet I could do that faster." I don't know exactly why we do things like that...but we do, and like Uncle Dave said, "Mike, you will always do stupid stuff."

He's right. Like this past weekend. I needed to buy another bike for our friends who came to town. As I'm walking back the new bike in one hand and my own bike in another from the 6 football field sized supermarket by our house, I thought myself, "This is way too slow...I bet I could ride my bike while holding on to the new bike...yeah, that's a good idea."

Now, I always get stared at when I'm on my bike. It is understandable. For one I'm white, two I'm 6'2", and three my bike is probably a good 6 inches taller than anyone else's. Staring might be the wrong word...feels a little more like getting checked out. Often when I stop I look around to see who is doing it just because I can never get over how obviously they do it. They start by looking at my face, then slowly move their eyes downward, fixating on my bike (I think) and then back up to my face...the whole time I'm still looking at them thinking, "My face is up here buddy." And as if I didn't get stared at enough, what I'm about to do made me totally deserve it.

I proceded to hop on my bike grabbing my handle bar with my right hand and the other bike's handle bars with my left. I slowly made my way through the first intersection (which is like the size of an American city block). Feeling pretty confident and allowing my man-ness to come out I decided I could go a little faster. As I was almost home I had to make a slight turn to the left to avoid the three wheeled flaming potato cart. This would have been fine had the handle bars not been touching each other. As I turned left, the new bike turned right and cut out my tires from underneath me. I was going slow enough that I put my foot down, only to have the gears on the new bike scrape down my leg in a perfectly spaced curvey path.

That will be an amazing scar.

As the scarring takes place I go flying over my bike with my left foot still on ground and plenty of time to think about how stupid I look and how I better jump up quickly after I hit the ground so I can save what little pride I have left and not get run over by the 20 mopeds tailing me. Of which I manage to do (except for maybe saving the pride). In this process I also broke the brake on the brand new bike and bent the handle bars. Thankfully labor in China is cheap and I got both fixed for about $5.

Lesson learned? Probably not. Good story? Most definitely! Awesome scar? Time will tell.