On Monday night at English corner we met our first sister here. We were having some conversations about our first day meetings and I was introduced to a girl who also believes just as we do. She said that she goes every first day with her family to participate in meetings. They drive about 30 minutes from this school to get there. For now, I'll call this girl C. C is such a sweet and gentle girl. She doesn't actually tell people about her beliefs. Also, her English is not so good. C has a best friend who speaks English very well and she's the one who introduced me to C. I don't know this girl's name, but she told me she's been asking C to take her to the first day meetings for months now. I mentioned to C that we should all go together. She was so excited about this that we made plans for next week. This trip doesn't benefit me in anyway, but I'm hoping it will encourage C to do her job as a believer and that it will open a door for C's friend to become a believer as well. We'll see how it goes.
Building of Peace
We were wandering down a street on Monday trying to find a public bathroom when we happened to find a large building with a cross on it. Honestly, we would never have noticed it if not for the construction crew that was working on it. We saw a sort of stage inside with theater style seating. Colonel looked up (way, way up) and saw a large cross on the building. We passed the building and went on to the bathroom. On our way back from the bathroom, we stopped to take some photos of the building.
Exploring We went exploring last weekend and happened upon some strange and interesting places. The first was an underground vegetable market. It's a huge place that is fairly clean inside. The vegetables are ridiculously large and there's tons of them. We also found a cooler with 3 sharks in it. One was a baby shark about 5 feet long. The other two were 2-3 feet long hammer head sharks. The guys selling the sharks wanted 8,888.88 yuan for the 5 foot long shark. I told him it was too expensive. He told me that it wasn't really for sale. Anyway, it was cool to see it. I've never seen a shark up close like that before. |
By far the strangest thing we happened across was a large platform that spanned the river. It had orange smashed all over it. We never could figure out why. Eventually we came to the end of the river and ended up having to climb over a handrail to get out of the place. We probably wouldn't have done that if we didn't see other Chinese folks doing it. As they say, "When in China, do as the Chinese do."
The most interesting conversation we've had this weekend happened while we were out exploring. We wandered down yet another side road and found what looked like an outdoor market of some sort. It ended up being a very poor area of town where some people sold stuff, but mostly people were just living. We walked all the way to the end of the street and it got progressively worse looking until we ended up at a dump. So, we retraced our steps back to the entrance and stopped there for a bathroom break. While there, an old white haired man approached us and he was speaking very quickly. He also had a younger friend with him.
After trying several times to figure out what the old white haired man was talking about, I picked out a few words in Chinese that I thought were words I could look up in my dictionary. I pulled out my phone and searched up the word feizhou in my Chinese app. It turns out that this is the word for Africa. It made sense that the man would be asking if we were Africans. I told him that we are not Africans, we are Americans. The old man refused to accept this. He kept speaking about our dark skin and that we must be Africans who live in America. Not Americans. I insisted that we are indeed Americans. I've never even been to Africa. Anyway, we could not convince this old man. His younger friend believed us. He told the old man that we are Americans. This led to an argument between the two of them on whether or not we were American or African. Colonel and I just stood there watching them. It was very funny and also a little sad.