BICF and lunch in Australia
Today we went to church at Beijing International Christian Fellowship which was different. BICF is an international church which means that local people aren’t allowed to attend only foreigners. To get into the church you have to show a foreign passport. The service was in Mandarin and English with various other languages added occasionally. It was interesting looking around and seeing the racial break up. About one third of the congregation was Caucasian, half was Asian and the remained were form all over the place. The best part of the service was when we sang amazing grace in Mandarin, Japanese, Russian, Korean and English. After the service I was trying to get directions to one of the markets and I saw a couple standing in the foyer. The wife talking to someone while the husband waited. I figured that the husband would be waiting for a while so I introduced myself and asked for directions. We ended up chatting for a while and then his wife joined in when she finished her conversation. To cut a long story short they invited us to there place at the Australian embassy for lunch. I assumed he just work in administration but after we arrived I found out that I’d actually approached the guys just under the Australia Ambassador. His wife lent Sheree Gilmore Girls season 3 and showed us where everything was on our map. It was really cool being able to ring up my parents when we got home and say that we had had lunch in Australia because the embassy is technically part of Australia.
After lunch we went to a shoping center that was supposed to be good but I found it boring and expensive. After that we went next door to BuyNow which is a four story computer mega store. It’s not just one store but hundreds of mini stores. I soft my screen in Australia to save weight and until I needed a new screen to get it up and running again. After looking around I picker a 20 inch wide screen LCD from ViewSonic with a three year pick up warrenty in Beijing for $459. I’m loving it. After buying the screen I had to carry it around the russian markets (a small price to pay) while Sheree look for cloths. In the end there wasn’t really anything she like so we came home and I finally go to setup my computer. For dinner we decided to check out a new resruant with Garith (one of the other new teachers) that had English menus which was a nice change. It was slightly more expensive and the servings were smaller but the food was good. We ended up buying a Oxford Chinese < -> English dictionary for $3 so Sheree could carry around a dictionary as well.
Overall it was a fantasitic day.
