Some more goings-on...
So, we're starting to prepare for a new academic year at UBC, and we've got our new and improved website up as well as a blog where we've been tossing around ideas regarding our vision for the campus. Voir links on the right. I'm really excited to see what God will do through us at UBC this upcoming year!
Sigh...
Girls are such strange creatures. I still don't have them figured out yet. It makes it harder to observe them when you are one yourself though.
Anyways....
Staff are leaving tomorrow! Scary and exciting at the same time. It seems as if I've been unofficially put in charge of organizing something as a goodbye thingy of sorts. Haha. Will be fun.
I had my last discipleship meeting with Julie yesterday...it was a good time of just "jaser" and fun. She likes to draw and paint as well, so she had brought up her watercolour pencils and stuff...but we ended up playing with my beads and she made me a bracelet and I made her a necklace. Yup. We were saying that I could sell jewelery instead of get a job...since nobody seems to be calling me back.... I really wouldn't mind doing that, but I'd have to see about permits and stuff...and it will take time to make enough stuff to actually start selling. Hm. I'm thinking of maybe volunteering for the various festivals that will be going on over the course of the summer in Montreal. I'm too late for the chamber music festival though...it's going on right now.
"The sweetest thing..."
Hm. Aaron, if you're reading this, I have another story now to answer your "sweetest thing" question! Haha. For those of you who don't know, Aaron, the master of random yet often profound questions, once asked about the sweetest thing a guy has ever done...and so now I will tell you all about last Friday's dinner. And note the use of the present historic tense!
The story actually begins from dinner on Monday...well my part of it anyway--I suppose the guys' part begins a few weeks earlier. So on Monday, after a wonderful dinner prepared for our Food Group by Danae and James, we were trying to figure out who will cook for Friday's dinner. Immediately Jeremy volunteered, "I'll cook with James on Friday!" Seeing that James had just cooked that night I wondered suspiciously for a short while, but since James was okay with it I decided to let it go.
Fast forward to Friday morning after prayer when we discover that Andy and Jon are cooking for their Food Group and Brad and John are cooking for their Food Group. Heather makes the comment that all the guys are cooking, and we wonder and marvel at the fact...but in the end I think nothing more than that it's just a coincidence. Afterwards Brad, Hannah, Jenny, and I go to Chinatown, originally planning to have dim sum since neither of them have any experience in that area, but we end up going to Niu Kee (牛記), a restaurant opened by a former Beijing opera star that Andy was raving about earlier that morning. Raving about the restaurant, not the opera star. During lunch, Brad asks us about Mexican food, this being the day for ethnic food experiences...but evidently we know nothing about it. Other than the fact that it has cilantro...and I only know about that because it's in Chinese food too.
Anyways, after having finished our 但但麵, 魚香肉絲, 腰果雞丁, 小籠包, 蔥油餅, 蒜茸豆苗 (spicy noodles, "fish flavour" spicy pork, cashew chicken, small steamed buns, green onion pancake, and minced garlic pea plants...it's hard to translate food names), orange slices, and fortune cookies (Brad ate his whole, paper and all...) with minimal leftovers that Jenny wants to bring home for 下午茶 (afternoon tea), Brad proceeds to fiddle with his phone and mumble something about meeting John and calling him and batteries being low. I assume they were supposed to meet for discipleship or something because it's still way too early to make dinner, and although Brad is somewhat preoccupied with his phone, we wander around Chinatown for a bit and he buys a Chinese/English Bible, with counsel from Jenny and myself, that he can give to Fan, one of the guys he led to Christ a few weeks earlier. Somewhere along the line, Jenny disappears to somewhere, and while we wait for her to come back Brad recommences fiddling with his phone and muttering about calling John and low batteries. Both Hannah and I offer our phones for him to use, but he refuses. I think that it's a bit odd...because if he's supposed to meet John, they should contact each other to decide on where and when...but I figure that Brad's just being super-polite and unobtrusive that day and think nothing more.
After Jenny returns, we basically split off; Brad going back to Solin and Hannah, Jenny, and I continuing on to Old Montreal where we were planning on doing some random evangelism. The funny thing is that while we are on the way to Old Montreal, Julie calls Hannah because they supposedly had an appointment for discipleship in the morning. Our plans are cut short because of this, but we do manage to have adventures with triangular grippy pencils, an amphi-bus, fluorescent pink cherry-ginger flavoured Perrier, and the Hugger Busker before we return.
The rest of the afternoon is pretty quiet and uneventful...I read some
Modern Canadian Plays and Jenny comes up to use the computer...Lydia comes in to get Jenny to teach her some Chinese...and that's basically it. Until Chara comes home from work and announces that her Food Group is cooking and eating in our apartment. It's quite odd though because they usually eat at Andy's house, and what makes it even more odd is that Andy is cooking.... Wouldn't it make more sense for Andy to cook at Andy's house and eat at Andy's house? Anyways, Chara cleans the apartment, which is good because it needed cleaning, and we wait for the Food Group to appear. 5:45 (meeting time for Food Group) comes and goes and so we wonder where everyone is...especially the boys who are cooking...and we begin to suspect that something is up. By the way, my Food Group meets at 6:00, so I wasn't late.
Finally just before 6, Andy comes up and announces that there has been a big problem and that everybody has to meet in the basement. Andy, by the way, is one the Project Directors and has this kind of authority to make these announcements. We all make our way to our meeting room in the basement, and as Julie tries to open the door, it gets pushed shut again by someone whose laugh sounds like Jeremy's. By then, we have all figured out that the guys have prepared dinner for us...haha. And sure enough, the menu states that one of the choices for the
plat principal is "crêpes mexicaines" stuffed with many yummy things including "poulet mariné avec cilantro." Haha! The other dishes on the menu are also crêpes, the other choice for the main course being "crêpes bénédict" and the dessert being crêpes with fruit, ice cream, and other sweet stuff. Despite orders getting mixed up, missing ingredients, and random bits of egg shell, it was a really really good meal! Hooray for Brad the Super Chef and the team of Super Kitchen Help and Super Servers! Jeremy also wrote and performed a song for us...something about appreciating the girls for encouragement and support, etc. Rainbow is now in posession of the lyrics and I think she's going to post them on her blog at some point.
Oh, and hooray for Chara and Jenny for cleaning up the kitchen afterwards! Just in time for us to dirty it again with our dumpling adventures the next two nights, haha! But that is a different story that may or may not be recounted at a later date.
fluorescent pink Perrier and triangular grippy pencils 
amphi-bus 
Hannah and Jenny with the Hugger Busker 
the Hugger Busker 
Selene and Jenny enjoying their crêpes bénédict 
my crêpes mexicaines 
Rachelle and her crêpes bénédict 
Jeremy and James 
Jenny attacking the Project Director with the rolling pin we used for the next night's dumpling-making party 
the sugar that's pretending to be milk 
my dessert: crêpes with ice cream, bananas, and maple syrup...and they were bigger than the main course 
Jonathan emerges from the kitchen covered in icing sugar and eating out of a pot lid 
Jeremy serenades us as Brad the Super Chef does a stint as a human music stand (like in Les Choristes)
Prayer requests!
Hey.
Super fast post to ask for your prayers. We're doing a
The Da Vinci Code outreach this afternoon, basically doing surveys and asking people what they think about the movie and the book. Our results will be sent back to headquarters in Langley where they will be tabulated for another press release. There was an article in
The Globe and Mail yesterday in which they interviewed one of our Montreal staff, John Bellingham. I was impressed...although the article didn't really say anything worth reading about, it didn't misinterpret Crusade's stance of using the movie to incite spiritual discussion rather than boycotting either. I can't say that much for the comments left on the
Globe website though. The first time I read the article, there were 16 comments, when I went back there were 32, and seconds later when I refreshed the page there were 64. Doubling...exponentially...most of them quite negative.
Anyways, I will ask that you pray for our group as we head out to four movie theatres (three English, one French) to collect people's opinion...that we will have wisdom and discernment when we answer any questions. I also anicipate that my roommates and I will be at the French theatre since we seem to be among the most adept in the language...and so please pray as well that we won't end up saying something when we meant to be saying something else on account of language differences. One last thing, please pray for good weather! It's been wet and rainy this past week, some say that it's the fact that so many of us are from BC and we brought the rain with us...but I beg to differ. The rain is actually harder than Vancouver rain, so...yeah. But anyways, I think we will be standing outside the theatres, so good weather would be good!
I'll finish by directing you to
www.discussdavinci.com, Crusade's website that gives background resources on the historical data etc. that the book (and movie) are based on. I watched the movie yesterday afternoon, and I know that without this background information, one can get pretty confused by what they'll see.
Waiting
The interview went okay I guess. She was supposed to call me back today because she makes the schedules on Thursdays and she said she'd call me before she makes the new schedule. Hm. Maybe she meant next Thursday. Someone did call and leave a message today when I was making dinner (my voice mail actually works now!) but the message was just the sound of hanging up. Hm. I didn't recognize the number though so I don't think it was her.
Anyways, tomorrow I'm going to go to this thing at Laura Secord in a nearby mall...they're having some sort of hiring event in the afternoon. Yup.
Today there was a big potluck for people in the residence. Apparently people went knocking on every door this morning inviting everyone who opened their door to one of our apartments (our apartment meaning apartment inhabited by project people) for dinner. That was pretty cool. Good to meet people in the residence...one of our "target groups." There are a lot more people living here than the number that showed up though...I think a lot of people were out when the knocking happened. They were testing the fire alarm and sprinkler systems and stuff today, so I guess people left. I know I did. I went to the Atwater market to have lunch at the
Sushi Shop. I actually applied to work at their Monkland location.... Monkland is actually a pretty neat area...reminds me of the Glebe.
One week later....
Ok. I just remembered that it's my turn to cook dinner today, so this is gonna be a super fast post. First things first: I applied to quite a few places for jobs, and I have my first interview on Tuesday at
moozoo. Please pray for me!
Thursday was our first weekly coffeehouse meeting. Oh, Karina (a girl from my church in Ottawa whom I haven't actually seen in a few years) is living in the same building as us! How cool is that? She came Thursday night and she might be coming a few more times before she finishes her internship and goes back to Ottawa for the rest of the summer.
Today was our first outreach day. One person made a decision for Christ! Yay! Lots of people ran into Chinese people who were really eager to know more about God. Encouraging. I'll write more on today's stuff later.
Yesterday was our social night..."The Incredible Race." Yup. And we won. Yay! I'll post pictures later too.
Now I have to think of what to cook for dinner....
