china - All in a Day's Work

This is going to be a very odd post. I had been sitting here for a while and couldn't think of anything to write, so I decided to just describe some of today's happenings with you in a few quick paragraphs. Once I get some pictures from my companions (hopefully tomorrow morning), then I will likely turn some of these simple paragraphs into full-fledged posts.

In the meantime, enjoy reading what I remember from today:

- Being ferried in my car across the Yellow River in a barge, together with motorcycles, pedestrians, buses, trucks, 4x4s, and 4 chickens.

- Missing the first ferry because I was too busy eating a delicious breakfast of fried lamb intestines at a hole-in-the-wall (literally) cafe a few hundred yards up from the dock.

- Bottoming out and almost getting myself completely stuck in an awful stretch of road that was nothing but a deep mess of truck ruts and deep, deep mud, then watching the police car behind me get stuck just after I managed to get through.

- Eating "dapanji" (big-platter-chicken) for lunch with Jan (from Europe) and Daniel (from Africa) in a remote mountain-top town full of Chinese-Mongolian Muslims.

- Stopping to ask a few questions in a small village, only to witness an old lady nearly stab an irate government official with a sickle who was physically abusing her husband. The incident occurred because of a dispute over whether the family was allowed to use the road as a place to let their wheat dry out or not. We happened to get out of our car just as the government guys arrived and the fighting erupted.

- After the action had quited down a bit, one of the neighbors was finally able to answer the agricultural questions that we had been trying to ask people in the village. Through that conversation, I made a friend. The man's name is Ma Huo and I have an open invitation to return with my family to visit his house and have tea. Please pray for him and his fellow villagers!

- Eating dinner with a bunch of friends and fellow laborers at the popular Chinese pizzeria "Origus". Among the 6 of us adults who were there, 5 nationalities were represented. Can you guess which ones? Here are the partial spellings:

-s-

-e-u

-e-h-r--n-s

---i-o

--u-h --r--a