Latte Please!

This is the newest addition to our kitchen - an espresso machine! Julia got me this because she loves me! She knows how much I like coffee.

I said that I wanted to get an espresso machine (because there aren't a ton of cafes in Savan) and just because I love lattes. I also have lots of meetings with the girls and most of them also enjoy coffee - so I thought it would be easy to make coffee at home instead of always going to a cafe. I said I would get one if it was around $100, but I hadn't been to Thailand yet to check them out. (Little did I know that they are a bit more than $100!)

I forgot a few things up in Vientiane that I wanted Julia to send down on the bus to me. She sent them down Friday night, so early Saturday morning, I went to the bus station to pick up my 3 boxes.

When I opened them I was surprised with this beauty! Julia's so good with analogies and such. She had been having a hard time with me leaving and she said this espresso machine is like our friendship - our friendship will continue to be deep and rich but it will be in smaller doses now. How true!

She also left a sweet note! How love is costly and she wants to love extravagantly! We are so very different - we give and receive love in different ways, but this is definitely a way I feel loved - she knows of my love of coffee too.

I've been thinking of loving extravagantly - I'm so often so stingy with my love. Or it's easy to love certain people, but I want to love everyone extravagantly - even those who I don't like all too much. And when I think of the ultimate gift of love on the cross and how costly that was, it makes me want to love others freely and extravagantly too!

New Friends

Almost everywhere I go, as a foreigner in Asia, I get asked to take a picture with someone. These are pictures from Julia and my trip to Xieng Khouang. These are only a quarter or so of the pictures we took with random people on the trip. 

 Notice my jacket and how cold I look? The weather was wondrously chilly!

Plain of Jars

Because I didn't write at all last year, I'm using some of my old pictures for now.

These are from Lao New Year, which is in April. For Lao New Year, Julia and I went to Xieng Khouang, a province up north in the mountains. In Xieng Khouang, there is a plain of jars that are made from stone. Some of the jars are 6 or more feet tall and 6 or more feet across. They're huge!

No one really knows what these are from. Some legends say that giants used to live here and they made the jars to keep their rice whiskey in. Another one is that they were made to collect rain water to use during the dry season. Who knows?

The weather was so nice and cool up in the mountains!! It was a high of only 70 or so for a couple of days. In Vientiane the temperature was right at a hundred, so it was a welcome relief! 

 The road getting there was very dusty though! :P April is towards the end of dry season, so there was dust everywhere! Not so fun.

New House

I flew (for $60 round trip!!) to Savan (my new city) last weekend and found a house pretty quickly! It's less than 2 km from school, which will hopefully be great for having students over.

We live on the edge of town - across from beautiful rice fields.

We have a pink house!

One of the three bedrooms.

Nice spacious kitchen with lots of cupboards!

A little gaudy entertainment center/bookshelf/doorway to the kitchen.

Nice big living room/dining room.

And it has two bathrooms. He will clean the house for us and add a few things that we need. We move in the end of September. :) I'm excited to be in Savan and start teaching!

What a blessing it was to find the house so quickly and from a landlord who seems to be on top of things. The original price was $400 a month, but after my boss talked to him he lowered it to $350. Not bad for three people.

Trees in the Temple

After spending a month in Phnom Phen, the capital of Cambodia. we headed to Angkor Wat, which is a bunch of Hindu temples built between 900 and 1200. 

This temple was my favorite. It was kinda forgotten about for a couple hundred years, so when these trees began to grow, no one was around to pull them out or to kill them, so they kept growing and growing. And now there are huge trees growing on top of, in, through, between, under . . . the temple and doors and windows. Pretty cool, huh? 

Friendly Fishies

These are fish that eat the dead skin our your feet. It feels a little funny at first, but it's kinda fun once you get used to it. Most were pretty little, but some were a little large for my preference. They have no teeth, so they can't bite. That's what the sign said, but now that I think of it, I'm not sure how they eat the dead skin without teeth. . .

A New Year

So I decided that I should write on here again . . . I'm afraid to write again because if I start now again I feel like I'll have to continue writing regularly. When I hadn't written for 6 months, I feel like I don't really need to anymore. But I'll write something now and see if I keep it up this year!

This is the beginning of my fourth year in Laos! I never thought I would still be here, but I am and I love it most of the time. 

I'm currently in Phnom Phen helping new teachers get their TESOL certificate. I'll be here for about a month and then head to Laos. I'm also moving to a new city this year - Savannakhet or Savan for short. So there will be some new adventures in a new city and at a new school!

I have a few more responsibilities this year as team leader. I'm excited for it, but also a little worried. We've been going over expectations and such for this year this past week; and while it's good, it also reminds me of what being a leader means. Being a leader means being a servant. As a sinner, I'm a pretty selfish person - I like to do things my way on my time. But that isn't usually the most loving way of doing things. And I wanna love people more than I wanna be selfish, I just don't always do it like I want to. 

But I also know that JC works best through our weaknesses. I don't need to try to be nice and kind and patient, I just need to rest in him and rely on his strength. In him, I can be the best, most servant like leader ever! - by relying on JC's power and not mine.