Llama Island... no me llama Tina

Soo This morning we headed down to a 9:30 service at The Union which is a small non denominational international church. It was lovely so lovely and truly beautiful to see people from all nationalities, walks of life, ages , race, etc. all coming together to worship the same God. They had this amazing 20 person choir that sounded like it was made up of like 50 people and the pastor was a woman that truly understood who she was speaking to. One of the guys that read the scripture truly should've had the theme from boondock saints playing while he read he had an awesome accent...

After church we came headed back to our flat for some lunch and to change clothes and then around 12:00 we walked down the the MTR at Admiralty and took that to the ferry and then took the ferry to Llama Island ( I have no idea how to actually spell Llama island but I know that's how it sounds) Now the thing is there is no llama's at llama island, which is a bit disappointing, but it was still a fun afternoon none the less. we meandered through a bunch of little local shops and while on our way t owards the beach it started raining quite hard( not just a light dusting of rain but rather a fairly consistent shower) and who wants to sit in wet sand when it's raining... so we decided this would be a good opportunity to expand our pallet by enjoying some more Hong Kong food. We sat and shared several dishes and I gave one of Hong Kong's libations a try... verdicts still out on whether it tasted good or not either way it had a sweet bottle.... Anyways we had some pinapple and pork,( American name- Sweet and sour pork) some steamed buns( loosely translated as hunks of dough steamed dipped in condensed milk.) and then fried noodles and beef ( no easy translation for that it's exactly what it sounds)
After food we went to a place that over looked where the ferry comes in. While there a "police car" and "fire Truck" if you can call them that passed by in actuallity they were 4-wheelers with flashing lights on them painted the respected colors ( police- blue fire truck- red) and with a ton of equipment on the back. I guess you use whatever works and gets the job done, but it was the most interesting police and fire truck i'd ever seen and I would hope that they wouldn't have to take back any criminals in the back of the police car because there was absolutely no room... We sat outside in this little Brittish woman's bar and drank cokes for a while and then we hopped on the ferry and headed back to Hong Kong.

After a quick stop at the grocery store to pick up brownie mix (neccessity), cereal, gold fish crackers, bread , cheese, peanut butter, and orange juice we took a taxi back to our flat to hang out for the evening, make brownies and watch Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. It was over all a very enjoyable day.

One thing that i'm continually amazed by is the mix here. The mix of people, mix of buisness, rainforest water undeveloped and overly developed land, mix of socioeconomic status. It's all this major mix and theres just no way to really figure it out as an outsider. hopefully with time that willl be something we can gain insight into.

This week we hope to have some sight visits to our schools which we've recently found out will be about an hour to and hour and a half away by bus each morning :) The site visits will depend on whether the government opens the schools up again and also if one of the schools decides they want us the run the English program there. We move into our Volunteer flat on Tuesday which is exciting it will be our permenant housing for the rest of our stay in Hong Kong and to top it off it is farther down the hill so biiig hills/sets of stairs we have to climb when heading home from anywhere. which is amazing! Wednesday Don comes which we're all excited about because we're hopeful he can give us some insight into what we must do while we're here and our program etc. It should be a busy week. As of right now though, it has been a very nice and leisurely morning:) The word leisurely and chill had sort of drained out of my vocabulary up until yesterday. Glad to see it could be reintroduced. Still sweating buckets but I think I'm adjusting to that a bit I don't know if i'm adjusting to the heat or to the amount i'm sweating.... Either way I hear it is quite warm in Michigan( this I heard when skyping with my housemates and then some friends who were over at the house which was super fun to talk to all of them!) they said they were all quite toasty at Franklin...which isn't uncommon in our airconditionless home in Michigan... Well Happy Monday, or Sunday depending on where you are...
Peace

Tina