Saturday Plans

Plan A: meet with with N and celebrate her birthday at a cafe, then go visit friends outside of town, then meet with M in town

Results: N ended up going out of town for the weekend, friends out of town got sick and M texted to say she could no longer meet but I did work on wedding invitations while I waited.

Plan B: meet with V, go grocery shopping, meet with U and catch up on random things.

Results: V never answered my text and U didn't get back to me until 5 hours later but I did go get groceries.

Plan C: write a couple blogs and maybe meet with U

Results: It's 4pm and I've wrote a couple blogs and am waiting for U to show up.

I'd like to think that people aren't just avoiding me and that it's just the constant culture of change in my life and the inability to plan ahead...yeah, we'll hope it's the last one ;)

My Russian University

I am thankful that I have a visa to live here in Russia and I am thankful that the university I attend is affordable and flexible with me (they don’t seem to care too much that I skip classes to travel). The teachers are good people and I enjoy being around them. I have also come to know several Chinese, Korean and French students thanks to classes.

Yesterday at university there were a couple things that made me shake my head more than normal.

In our RUSSIAN audio-visual class we watched a clip from an AMERICAN movie in CANTONESE that our CHINESE classmates where supposed to translate for the rest of us. They were able to pick out a few details even though the “Chinese” it was in was not their “dialect”.

The same day I was amused by the long line at the coat-check. I (like most of the foreign students) don’t like to use the coat check because I have to empty out my pockets to keep things from getting stolen, stand in line to drop it off and again to pick it up. It is much easier just to carry it with you to class. But many of the teachers yell at students for this because it is “unsanitary” and “rude”. Typically there are several students working at the coat-check (or I should say 2 working and 3 sitting around watching them work). But yesterday, there was only one poor old lady working there. For whatever reason she needed to take a break at 2pm (just after classes get out) so a rather long line built up in her absence. There was nothing we students could do except wait for her return and then wait until she one by one fetched our coats. It ended up being only a 15 minute wait for me.

All in all these things are not a big deal. They’re just a couple examples of the many things in our everyday lives here that cry out “inefficiency” and “waist of time!”

Thankfully God gives little blessings to make the little frustrations a little more bearable. One of which is that my Chinese classmates invited me to come make and eat dinner with them on Sunday :) I pray that I will pay less attention to the frustrations and more attention to the opportunities that God gives me, looking at nothing that He has called me to do as a “waist of time”.