T8 & T9 - busily rolled into one

Today and yesterday seem to have been more like ‘normal’ life here, and have contained pretty mundane things like grocery shopping. We’ve been to the PCT offices twice, once yesterday to pick up my new camera, and again today for Hsinte to pick something up.

Last night we had another ‘typical’ pastoral visit, this time to a nearby park. We met four generations of the same family. The youngest were visiting home from work and university in America, so it was good to chat to them while Hsinte talked to the parents and grand-parents. Afterwards, in the busy park we prayed together for grandma who is suffering from Alzheimers. It was good to be part of this ministry.

This morning we gave a service in a bike shop. The owner of the shop comes to the church and he has just bought the new shop which will seel bikes and his mother will also sell jewelry too. They asked for the minister to hold a service their to bless the place and to pray for the family. There were about 10/15 people there and I ended up playing the keyboard in the office!

After this we headed back for lunch and then went to the train station to show me the way and buy me a ticket for the High Speed Railway (covers 345km in 90 mins….so i reckon that’s an average of 160mph). On Sunday I’m going to be heading to a church in Taichung to see how a church in Central (and more rural) Taiwan may differ from the city centre church here in Taipei. The trip to the train station involves a bus and then the underground. The underground, in comparison to London’s is amazing. It is so clean and they have a rule of no eating and drinking on the tube, and what’s more its fully air-conditioned :). There are two levels to the underground. On the bottom layer the trains run, on the next layer up are the ticket booths, and these too are all connected with underground malls and shopping precincts, so you could walk if you wanted!

This evening I have been for a walk alog one of the roads leading into city centre. There are some pictures of the town which I’ve put in the Miscellaneous Pictures section.

This entry was posted on 23/09/2009 at 05:32 pm and is filed under Paul's diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.