(Sounds, too: As I write this I hear the melancholy strains of Fur Elise from an ice-cream-truck-style speaker wafting through heavy rain. It's the neighborhood garbage truck - the music is the signal to bring your trash down)
It's a good time to be arriving too; the specific ministry activities I'll be participating in have just gotten started, but haven't been running long, so I'm joining them at the perfect time. Also, Christmas is one of our special outreach opportunities, and I've made it here in time to participate. Doubtless this and a host of other unknown reasons were factors in God's schedule for my arrival time.
The trip itself was an eventful one; the day before I left included finishing packing my luggage, designating some things to be sent in boxes later, mailing packages, getting cash to convert over, visiting my grandparents, dinnering with some old friends, losing my wallet which apparently leapt from my pocket and into the road while visiting my grandparents, driving back to my grandparent's/uncle's house and finding said wallet with the help of my family, attending the opening midnight showing of the second Hobbit movie with my siblings as a last fun outing (Tolkien is a big deal in my family), leaving it 30min later than planned due to technical difficulties with the film, rushing home and throwing everything into our family's car and driving straight to the Nashville airport for a 7AM flight to Los Angeles. (For free, due to the generosity of someone who gifted me with the necessary air miles.)
In LA I was picked up by the friend of a sister of a friend and visited Community Christian Alliance Church in Northridge to share my testimony and Taiwan plans with a Chinese fellowship there. After a great time of fellowship and sharing I got a few hours of sleep at the church's guest house then left the next morning for LAX to fly to Taiwan.
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| Hello LA.. If you squint just right, behind that tall palm tree you can see the Hollywood sign |
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| A very tired me eating some very good Indonesian Hakka Chinese food |
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| CCAC Friday Night Chinese Fellowship |
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| Kringla (sweet bread snacks, a family recipe from the Scandinavian side) my mom made to take with me, and Ecuadorian chocolate from a South American missions trip from which a Chinese pastor of the church I visited in LA had recently returned. These are the snacks I had when I got to Taiwan... reality can truly be more interesting than fiction. |
The trans-pacific flight was as per usual (no sleep at all), but I had a good conversation with a Japanese exchange student from Chiba who'd been studying in Arlington, Texas (not far from my seminary in Dallas). After arriving in Japan there was a nearly two-hour delay out of Narita airport, where I made the most of getting temporarily stuck with some curry tonkatsu and successfully avoided the temptation of the green tea kit kats. I do owe Narita a slight apology, as I'd been complaining about the lack of good restaurant options, but that has been addressed over the past couple of years. (Where I ate was not really one of those good options, in terms of quality of food, but it was a cheaper one)
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| Major fail for the in-flight tracking app. We still had an hour left. (And were not veering off course towards the Philippines) |
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| Tonkatsu with curry sauce. It's basically a deep-fried porkchop with savory gravy, so I have no idea why these aren't more popular in the South... |
Finally I arrived at Taoyuan airport and was picked up by a long-time Taiwanese friend and coworker, and after waiting for an hour for a bus with seats available, we arrived at his home around 2:30AM Monday morning, or noon on Sunday for US central time.
That may have sounded like more than one day, and that's because it all took place over about 72 hours. It seemed like one long, blurred-together day, though, or maybe one and a half, since the only sleep I got was those few hours at the church guest house. Haven't had that little sleep over 4 days since seminary finals week!
Today I slept in a little, then joined a prayer meeting at the home of my Taiwanese coworker's family. We spent a while lifting up the ministries surrounding the church plant, the people currently attending them, and the area we hope to reach: 6 neighborhoods with no church. (And in Taiwan a neighborhood is not a cul-de-sac...)
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| A bit of the neighborhood I live in now, via streetview. |
I made a little excursion in the rain to get some toiletries later, but was foiled in my plan to use my Mandarin flawlessly when presented with a question I didn't understand, that was apparently asking if I had preferred customer status. Thankfully I did understand the question when it was repeated more simply: do you have a card with us? (I'm looking forward to those Mandarin classes... I'm tired of the gaps in my conversational abilities and it's high time I learned to read at the newspaper level)
Anyway, so that's how I got to Taiwan this time. I won't be doing "and then I, and then I" posts very often, but just wanted to do an update on getting here.
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