Sister Good Stops Sweating

After experiencing the hottest October on record in Hong Kong since they started keeping track in 1884, the temperatures in Hong Kong have finally started to cool off. Just Friday I was wearing a sleeveless shirt and shorts and was still dripping in sweat as I walked around the largest, outdoor, bronze, seated Buddha statue in the world on Lantau Island during Margaret’s and my “Adventure Day” (aka “day off”). Granted, I sweat like a guilty man before the jury any time it gets above 80, but nonetheless, it was hot. The cooler temperatures (mid-70s) on Saturday and Sunday felt almost like winter after essentially five months of summer for us, and the cool breeze put me in the holiday mood. This is admittedly not difficult to do, considering that I have been listening to Christmas music since October (well, possibly a bit in September too, but I would never admit to that outright; don’t worry, I do this every year); the Christmas decorations that have recently starting popping up around the city don’t help.

Margaret and I have continued to present on American holidays during our Wednesday substituting, which keeps visions of sugarplums dancing in my head as we share about some of our favorite American holidays. During our most recent round of classes, Margaret and I had the students write a paragraph about their favorite holidays after we gave the presentation, and I thought you might enjoy hearing a few of their responses:

· My favorite holiday is Thanksgiving Day. I can say Thank you since I’m shy. If that day comes I want to thank my friends, teachers, and my parents.
· My favorite holiday is Valentines Day. I like it because it’s a very romantic Festival. We will give the chocolate to our friends. Because we didn’t have boy friends, but we still can give our friends. We will play with our friends all day because our father and mother was go a way to eat the romantic dinner.
· My favorite holiday is Christmas because it is celebrate Christ’s birthday. And also, at that day, we will exchange the Christmas presents, it is really exciting. I have an experience of it, when we exchanged the Christmas present, I got a newspaper. I felt angry! But never mind, I forgive her. So, I am really really love Christmas!
· My favorite holiday is Christmas holidays because Christmas gives me a feeling that it is romantic and warm in my heart. Also, we can sing songs and hymns to praise Jesus and we can admire the lights decorates…Thus, there is a other reason that makes me love Christmas a lot. I love winter very much and Christmas is in winter! If I can have a Christmas hope, I hope it can snow everywhere in the world during Christmas. Snow is very, very beautiful and graceful (I think). I think everyone has this feeling, too.

Some of the other holiday favorites included Halloween, Chinese New Year, Summer Holiday, and individual’s birthdays; it was quite fun to read all of the responses and see what sorts of things are important to the girls with whom we work at the school.

Sister Good’s Other Activities
In the cultural club this week, I led a session on American dancing, which included everything from square dancing to swing dancing to hip hop (although no professional ballet or modern dance) with lots of short video clips to demonstrate. At the end of the class I taught the girls the Electric Slide, which was an absolute riot—American culture is at its best in the Electric Slide!

On Sunday, Margaret and I, along with all the other ministers in the church, loaded into buses for a trip with our church’s elderly to ride the cable cars on Lantau Island. I have (affectionately I’m sure) been called “grandma” by some of my friends for some of my, in my mind, prudent habits, so I felt as though I was among my own kind even though it certainly did not look that way. I believe there were approximately 100 people in our group, most of them with gray or no hair and all of them with smiles. Margaret and I have got the smile part down, but we are still working on the gray hair; suffice it to say that we stood out a bit in our tour group of elderly Asian men and women, but it was a blast. We rode the cable cars through the mountains up to Ngong Ping, a “village” that is really a bunch of gift shops and restaurants. We spent about an hour at the refreshingly breezy mountaintop tourist village before riding the cable cars back down. On the ride back down, Margaret and I found ourselves in a car with 8 other people from our group, who, aside from one middle-aged man escorting his mother, did not speak any English. They were laughing a lot and looking at us; although I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I suspect it was something along the lines of “These two girls can’t understand a word we are saying!” It was pretty funny for all of us, and I had a great day with our church’s elderly.

Prayer requests: Although it seems like we just arrived, we are also aware that our time is drawing to a close. Please pray that we will be able to make the most of our last few weeks at Pooi To Middle and Swatow Baptist Church as we experience life with the people here.