Videos & Email Feed

[Tim]
In yesterday's blog post I had embedded two videos, but if you're subscribed via email they didn't come to you, and you may not know that you can see the videos by clicking the link to visit the actual blog.

http://vietnamchases.blogspot.com/2015/09/first-sights.html


7 Random Notes from here:

Rains have begun. It was dry and hot for several weeks.  Now it rains every night and heats up every day.

We have a couch!  Our first family movie night was watching Undercover Blues.  The kids find that the stiff new cushions make fabulous forts.

I'm causelessly sad.  Not tons, but if you are the praying sort and can pray for me and Daniel to seek and recover joy, we believe that Father answers prayers and that he has joy for those who ask.  And yes, we know about culture shock and the cycles of culture shock.

Classes haven't started for me yet.  Freshmen have sorted themselves into colleges and departments now, and by today they're supposed to have indicated whether they'll pay more for the CLC classes that get the foreign teachers.  Once they know how many CLC classes will be formed, they'll make my teaching schedule.  So maybe next week.

We continue to volunteer at the coffee shop English Clubs, and we invite students we meet there to come here for games and conversations.  A good rhythm for that is to have friends come after dinner, introduce a game and play it for a while, then go up to the roof for conversation and snacks.  Then back down for another game.  We haven't had a couch before, so maybe movies will become part of the options now.

We've brought our kids to a place where there are very few expat kids.  They are holding up okay, but it's an isolated and lonely place to be a kid, and I feel bad for them.  Tomorrow there is an excursion planned with the local expat Christian Fellowship youth group, so that's worth praying about.  We're short-timers here, so the other kids don't necessarily think it's worthwhile to form friendships with our three.

Life is happening on a weird timetable.  I remarked to Janet that something had happened a week ago, and she literally stopped walking and looked at me, incredulously.  I agree with her, too.  Things that happened a week ago are so distant in the past that we can actually remember how much less we knew about the city, the culture, etc.  It's like "back then, when we didn't know anything and life was hard--a week ago."

2 Random Pictures from here:

Motorbike + trailer

Porcupine meat