Monday, June 15, 2009

Things I wish I had blogged about

Phil and I are looking at the next few weeks and realize that the year is really coming to an end. We are ready to go home but there are some things that we will always remember, but I won't post about that for now. I will just post on some blogs that we wish we had blogged about but never got around to it.

National Concert Hall
My student is a talented violinist and won a competition to play at the National Concert Hall located at the Chang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall with other musicians. Unfortunately, her concert was on Wednesday at 7:30. Because of this, we could not go. Several other staff were going but we could not go because we would have school at 8:00 the next morning. (Taipei is around 3-4 hours from where we are currently at and the concert would have gotten out at 9:30 getting us home around 2:00. I don't do well without sleep) Tuesday evening, I realized that we could possibly take all of our students and go and see her perform. (And Jeremy said yes) So we put together a field trip (last minute) and went. Because we took all of the students, we did not have class until later in the day (Yeah) and I got to see my student perform in the National Concert Hall! If you click here, you can see some pictures of what this place looks like.

Reading Chinese
Phil and I have gotten pretty good at speaking Chinese (Only if you want to order something from the drink stand or why we are where we are. We have those down.) and can recognize a few words in Chinese. This is a good skill and is very helpful, for well, communicating with people we interact with every day. One thing you notice as you drive around, though, is that all of the signs have the "English" version of the Chinese written on them. Even though they have the English and it is helpful, you also notice the multiple ways to spell the same word. For example:

δΈ­: Means middle, center

Ways to pronounce it in Taiwan (What you see on the signs in Taiwan):
jhong, jong, jeung, jung, jhung, jheung, chong, cong, ceung, cung, chung, cheung, zhong, zong, zeung, zung, zhung, zheung

We have pretty much seen all of those. Many times a city will have the same road spelled 3 or 4 different ways within a few blocks of each other. (If you don't know the previous fact, it can get REALLY confusing.)

The reason why there are so many versions of the same word is that in China they use the Pinyin, but in Taiwan, they use pinyin along with 2 or 3 other differences. If you want to know about the romanization of Chinese in Taiwan, go here.

2 comments:

clarissa said...

HEY GUYS!!!!! jeese, we've missed you! you will not believe how God is turning our church completely upside down! i kept saying to myself 'update heather and phil, update heather and phil'
#1) pastor kimbrough got all us youth together in the kitchen one Sabbath afternoon in january and told us about some Share Him program. it called for us to give a 6-week seminar---that meant most of us had to give sermons! david, lizmarie, gabriel, mike volunteered to do sermons while sharon, catherine, and jaqueline were to sing songs & other duties. pastor k asked me if i wanted to give a sermon. I STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHY I AGREED TO DO IT! but i did. the series really took us off the ground. at least an average of 20-40 people were coming every saturday night. of'course i was a wreck, i was so nervous. through prayer and fasting, we all got through it. i ended up doing three, which i never saw coming. ever since the series ended around late march, we have been extremely active. i cant believe how much we're doing! we did a skit recently and now planning a serious christmas program.
#2) i was the speaker for our women's ministry sabbath! i have to give you guys the full details in person lol. all i will say about that is that God is good and He helped me write the sermon.
#3) alice jacobson (former leader of SNEC womens ministry) and her church (the Merrimack Valley church in Dracut, ma) invited me to be the speaker this past sabbath (6/13). we all had a blast! the members seriously rolled out the red carpet for me, my family, the martins, mrs timmins, dale&ivette& their family, etc.
#4) i got baptised! well, i figured it was time. jeffery was baptised on 6/14 and felix was baptised the same day i was. jaqueline is getting baptised in july. david, catherine, and lizmarie were baptised in november.
#5) the church is full with new babies! nicole steele had a baby girl. erin and wallace had a baby girl named london. joanne and keith had a baby girl named natalie. and guess what? pastor k's wife is expecting a baby i just found out over the weekened!
#6) we did a fundraiser on sunday to raise money for catherine, david, lizmarie, gabriel, and jaqueline to attend a pathfinder camperee in oshkosh, wisconsin. they needed $1,500. at first we thought, 'man, thats not happening'. praise God, we raised about $1,100 on sunday! that was just our regular church members! they already $700 and now they have $1,800! us being doubting thomases still cant believe we actually went over the amount needed. so ivette and mrs timmins are putting the extra money into our youth fund so we can do something fun this summer and start saving for a mission trip.
camp meeting is next week so that should be fun. we really miss you guys and cant wait to see you. its insane how much happens in a year!


God bless & cant wait to see you guys again,

clarissa

Mrs. Anderson said...

Clarissa!
That is incredible and I am very excited for you guys and the church! I had heard that God really used you in regards to preaching recently (from Elizabeth) and I think that is incredible! I absolutely can not wait to hear about it!

Heather