is a common bowl of stew or soup that a group of friends eats from, boiling on a kerosene burner. Bekah had farewell Hot Pot lunches with two separate groups of students. Here’s a bird’s-eye-view.

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After our long train ride from Chengdu, Auntie Bekah and I had breakfast at a little restaurant near her apartment. Emmeline, the restaurant was very small, about the size of our kitchen. Our breakfast was two different kind of dumplings–one was meat wrapped in a noodle made of rice, and the other was meat inside […]

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at 5:50. There was a scuffle on the way out the door of the train, a man shoving people out the way of an elderly man with a cane. Altruistic violence. And here we are, just before dawn in the city known as, “the Cool Capital.”

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On the all-night train from Chengdu to Liupanshui, Bekah’s city, I started writing an email to my friend Jared and it took on a life of its own. I thought it might be of general interest. I’ve been talking with Mel and with friends a lot lately about what a church should look like, which […]

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There are several categories of train tickets in China. There are Soft Beds, Hard Beds, Soft Seats, Hard Seats and Standing. For our 14-hour train ride from Chengdu to Bekah’s adoptive city of Liupanshui, we aimed for Hard Beds but landed in Hard Seats. We boarded the train at 3 in the afternoon, and when […]

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have given me a quiet chuckle. My Transit Boarding Pass was probably full of important information to get me through the airport and onto the second leg of my flight, but all I could read was, “Taste Underwear,” which didn’t seem like the direction I wanted to go. And after landing in Chengdu, a fuzzy […]

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Food on a skewer of all sorts is available at all hours and all places. And it’s good. Pictured here is spiced lamb roasted on an open fire, with náng–a flat bread basted with onion, butter and sesame, a staple food of the Uighur people. Uighurs (WEE-gers) are an ethnic people group in northwest China, […]

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Bekah picked me up at the airport in Chengdu. She was waiting for me (playing Solitaire on her phone) and greeted me with a sulky, Where have you been, and with a smile. Our plane sat at the gate for an hour and a half in Hefei for reasons that are still unclear to me, […]

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Emmeline, the wings of these planes are made of thin metal, kind of like our cars. In these pictures you can see the wings up close. You can also see footprints in the dirt on the wing where people have walked on it, probably when they working on the plane. Tom, what would they be […]

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We ate dinner on the train. Emmeline, you know the train cars we see outside of Queen City Bakery? There is a dining car on our train that has tables just like a restaurant, and people bring you food. Everyone eats with chopsticks, and watches the countryside slide by. Some people were playing cards and […]

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