Today and three weeks from today

This was an e-mail to a friend, and then I thought I could post it as a blog. So, here you go. :)

My sister, Lauralee, is coming to visit us in three weeks! I'm so excited to see her and show her our life here. She's excited for that and for the shopping. :) We're going to get some clothes made. They make super cute dresses and winter coats. And they make shoes! I got some made just because it's such a unique product/service to offer! Scarves abound as well, so I'm sure she'll be stocking up on those. She has really good taste, so I'm looking forward to shopping with her. :) She'll be here for a week, so she'll get to observe what a week of ours in Vietnam looks like.

Today is Saturday so we had our typical two morning kids classes. Between classes, we saw a group of 4 young Vietnamese men in the field next door. They had 2 roosters sort of fighting each other. It was interesting. I've never seen 'bird' fighting before, but I'm guessing they were just practicing or something, because it didn't look violent.

We had lunch at Bread of LIfe, the western restaurant in our city. :) The married couple owners are from Missouri and the staff is all deaf. The husband is also the pastor of our fellowship. It's a great mnistry! And the food is western, so it's a treat for us when we go there. The prices are more than street food, so we don't go there too often. The Sjaarda's spent some time there. They liked it, too. :)

This afternoon we relaxed, did some lesson planning and then this evening we both had classes again. I got home at 7:15pm (I taught one class) and Eric got home at 9:15pm (he taught two classes) with our supper. They make good sandwiches here. Tonight's sandwiches were egg, cucumber, onion, cilantro and some sauces. I pull the cilantro off, though.

Now Eric is doing some last minute practicing for chrch tomorrow. He's leading worship on guitar. I'm singing and we have another singer, someone on piano and someone on drums.

We love DIF (Da Nang International Fellowship). It truly is refreshing and our fellowship. We have truth-filled messages and great worship every week.

I am on the rotation for 'hosting'. So I get to open the service about once a month, read a scripture, pray and welcome the guests. I LOVE it! There is such a revolving door of people coming into town. People come for a week or two weeks or a few months, so we welcome people the first time they show up. :) And they get plugged in right away--if not into serving at DIF, then at least into the social circles. I love that kind of community. Friends are made quickly. New people are new for only a few weeks.

I will have eaten a lot...

I'm going through a small stack of papers and found this: some new year's resolutions of some of my students. Keep in mind that I first had to teach them what a New Year's resolution is... and they may not have understood completely. These are resolutions from a few different students.

They needed to complete the sentence:

I will have put on/lost.......my pimples on my face.

I will have eaten... a lot.

I will have saved....the world.

I will have grown/shrunk...one tree banana on back house.

I will have learnt....dance

I will have forgotten...bad memory.

I will have put on/lost...to play game

I will have read....1000 comic books.

I will have grown/shrunk...many trees on my garden.

I will have saved... money and times.

I will have spent...500,000VND on clothes (this is about $25 US. I felt pretty embarrassed when I read my new year's resolutions before this and said 'I will have spent $500 on clothes--believe me, I'm going to need clothes after a year here and not buying any)

I will have walked...every morning.

I will have eaten... a lot of fruit such as tomato, durian.


PS - Karissa says: If you ever get a chance to try durian, don't. This coming from someone who has tried cow tail, pig's stomach, gilatinous cow blood, pig's feet, whole squid, whole fish, etc.