• My conversation teacher asked me and another classmate if we would be willing to give a "lecture" to a group of Chinese foreign language students (i.e. they are studying English) about our respective cultures. The lecture is supposed to be one-and-a-half to two hours long! We agreed to split the time so that each of us could have 45 minutes or so, but the next day when the teacher came back to class it seems she misunderstood our request. Therefore, I’m slated at some undisclosed point in the near future to give an hour and a half lecture on some aspect of American culture.

  They are going to pay me to give this lecture as well…200 kuai (about 25$)! That’s big money around here. This lecture is also supposedly open to the public which could mean a terrifyingly LARGE number of people could be in the audience. How do these types of things keep happening to me?

   
• Yesterday, we experienced our first dust storm. The whole sky seemed gray and overcast. I actually thought it was going to rain. What a silly idea. It was actually just dust filling the atmosphere and blocking out the sunlight. Luckily it wasn’t too bad where we lived. There were no cyclones of dust.

   
• I am teaching tomorrow on I Peter 1 at our local gathering. I put together a little Powerpoint presentation which shows the life of Peter through various artists portrayals of him throughout the centuries. I have to say I really love the account of Peter’s life which are captured in the Gospels. He is just so human. It’s also so reassuring to see someone else who made so many (boneheaded?) mistakes being used in mighty ways for the Kingdom. He works in spite of us…

   
• Christa noted a few interesting things in our "natural" world this week: a few budding flowers on the bare trees; green grass; and an owl in a tree. She wanted to take a picture of the green grass. You have no idea how brown and gray everything looks here! Alas, spring is on its way…

   
• During our "start of the semester orientation" the foreign affairs department at the school informed us that since we are students and on student visas, we are not allowed to get part-time jobs to earn money. (Do lectures count??) But they informed us that if we needed money to pay for our school tuition, we were WELCOME to get a job to earn the money for this.  Hmmmm, interesting.

   
• We started our "Brian McLaren book" discussion group this past week. It brought back a lot of memories of all the conversation (or dialogues) I had with many of you a few years back. Now I get to relive those ideas with a new group of friends in a different cultural context. Should make for interesting discussions… Putting the post- back into postmodern.

Thanks for all the comments the past few weeks.  Sorry if I’ve been a bit lax in responding to some (or all?) of them.

More news at 11…