Sawatdiika! (Hello)

So, catch up. Yesterday was Sunday and our first church service in Thailand. It was a great experience. The congregation prayed for us as we are beginning classes tomorrow (Tuesday), and after the service we went back to Wat Umong to a “monk chat” where we met with an English speaking monk to talk about Buddhism and Thailand. The farang (white foreigner, think “gingo”) monk was very thorough in his answers and only answered about 4 or 5 questions in the hour and a half we were there. I had some more questions when it was time to go, but they have the monk chat every Sunday afternoon, so I might go back next Sunday if I'm not busy. We'll see.

Today we got up dark and early to go for a prayer walk around the Chiang Mai University campus, since it's right across the street and we will mostly be working with university students in out English classes. It has been a very nice day all day; it was raining a little during our walk this morning, but it's stayed “cool,” if you will, all day. It was a little bit of a bummer that it was so nice today since it was a day of training for teaching and all that jazz, so we were inside all morning. Getting everything set up and squared away for classes starting tomorrow.

I am actually a little nervous about this first week of teaching. I don't know how everything is going to go and how things are going to work out. Just praying and hoping it all goes smoothly; there's not much else to do. I'll be teaching 3 classes tomorrow from 4pm to 7pm. 4 days a week for the next 4 weeks. For the first time this is really starting to concern me, but I'm sure that everything will go smoothly.

The team is going to meet in about 20 minutes to plan things out for the first Friday night party at the English Center, and that's all we have planned for the day. Maybe we'll go down to the phone store to see if we can unlock my phone and get me a Thai SIM card for it so that I can stay in touch with the Evangel team. I don't really feel like doing much today after the early morning, but we'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll see if the team wants to take a sahng taw to another Starbucks to find the Chiang Mai mug for my sister-in-law. Oh, random side note, went to a Starbucks last night to see if they had the Thailand country mug or the Chiang Mai city mug and they were out of both. I was kinda bummed, but it was an amazing 2 story Starbucks! I think the Starbucks on Beacon in Lakeland needs to invest in a second floor. For real.

So, that's all for now friends, gotta go meet with the team and then figure out how things are gonna go for the rest of the day. Pray for us as classes start tomorrow and all the students have to be placed in class levels and we have to be assigned what level of students we will be teaching for the next month. Much love!

Images of the upstairs of the Starbucks in Chiang Mai we stopped at last night (didn't get anything).