Week 3

Well, hear I am, midway through week three!
This has been an interesting week because most of our partners have had final exams all week, so we haven't seen them much. As a result, we've spent more time hanging out as a team or exploring Xining.
Things are still going well between me and my partner. She is still the queen of random questions... at the end of each culture lesson we, as Canadians give a Journal Question intended to stimulate discussion between us and our partners. Most are quite deep and require lots of discussion. While they have all been very interesting and good questions, Jenny usually doesn't respond to them and asks me random questions like "What do you think about people who have sex change operations?" "Do you think gay people should get married?" or "What do you think about what Japan did to China during WWII, why should I forgive them?" Needless to say, it is keeping me on my toes!
This saturday we will continue to learn more about the local culture by visiting the large mosque in town. I hope that this will be another opportunity to generate discussion with Jenny like the visit to the Tibetan Buddhist Temple was.
Last night, a bunch of us brought a guitar out into the big square in the centre of the university and just hung out singing songs. As much as it pained me to sing them, the "classics" like Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" and Bryan Adam's "Everything I Do" worked well to draw a crowd of Chinese students and we had them involved in our singing and added in some of our worship songs as well. They love to sing here! A few of us ended up having a discussion with some Tibetan students studying at the other university in town but who were visiting our university.
My time is short on the internet here, so I will close with asking you to think of us in our last 10 days or so in Xining that we would not get discouraged or frusterated and that we would keep on loving our partners and having a good time with them.
For those of you in PG, I will be up there the weekend after I get home (along with Anna and Jeff Van Tol) and will be at Lakewood Sunday morning, hopefully we'll be able to share a bit about our trip with you. I'm not sure the exact dates we'll be there (Anna's sister is looking after getting our plane tickets for us), but the weekend is the 19th/20th of August. I'd love to see as many of you as I can!
For those of you in Victoria, I'll be there the following weekend for sure (probably a little longer as well as there's some other stuff I need to do in Victoria) - so that's the 26th/27th. I'll be at VPRAC Sunday morning and will share about the trip then.
Easterners and Lethbridgians - I haven't forgotten about you, but it will likely have to wait until December (in person anyway - once I have pictures up online, I'll let you know).
Zi Jien,
Gillian