I’ve got so much to share: the food, the sights, the food, the friends, the food, the outings, did I mention the food? Instead of trying to cram everything into one humongous post, I’ll share bits and pieces over multiple posts over the next week or so. Today, I’ll just share some highlights and give you a preview of posts to come.

I’ll start off with exactly why I decided to take my trip in the first place. I got offered a job at Toronto Hydro about a month ago (more on that in a future post) and the “plan” in the back my mind ever since graduating was to find a job, hope that there would be enough time between getting the job and starting the job to travel, and travel, ideally to the motherland: Hong Kong. And praise God, that’s exactly what I was able to do! So I booked a ticket and a week later, off I went!

The actual flights there and back were quite good. Long flights have the potential to be a pretty bad experience, but I was lucky enough to immensely enjoy both trips. On the way to HK, I sat beside the cutest five year old from Chicago. Her older cousin was taking her and  her sister to HK for the first time. She was absolutely crazy! Just completely off the wall, driving her cousin a little mad I think. She just wouldn’t sit still and kept squirming and doing crazy things like ripping of the head rest or throwing her sweater over the seat behind her. So much fun to share the journey with her and play with her a little. Children are great! The flight back was also great cause I decided to treat myself a little and upgrade to business class. Wow, so cool for such a long flight over. A seat that reclines completely into bed, really really good food (filet mignon, wines, hot roasted peanuts, the list goes on), great service, and a first class lounge to wait in. Totally worth it.

One of the highlights of the trip is definitely the food. So much food and such good food at that! It was one of the things I was most looking forward to before the trip and HK did not disappoint! One side note though. With so many people telling me how great the food there is, I was under the impression that HK’s food would be far superior than Toronto’s. And while the food there is quite amazing, I’ve come to realize how amazing Toronto’s food is as well. With the dishes I tried in HK that I could also get in Toronto, Toronto’s quality was mostly just as good. Toronto is definitely a dining mecca. Anyway, back to HK’s food.

So many different styles of food to try: from cheap to pricey, from Chinese to Thai to western to Japanese to countless others, from fancy dine-in places to dirty little local places, it was food heaven! One highlight I need to mention is my first encounter with foie gras. Oh my goodness, that stuff is so heavenly. If you’ve never tried it and get a chance to try it, make sure you savour that first bite as much as you can, you’ll never get a feeling like that in your mouth ever again! Other highlights include the best “po-tarts” ever, fresh seafood, amazing fruit desserts, Portuguese-Macanese food, and the best hot-pot I’ve ever had. Stay tuned on posts specifically for food.

The other major highlight of the trip was visiting friends and family and HK. This was my first vacation that I’ve taken on my own, but it didn’t really feel that way at all. With so many people to meet up and catch up with, it felt like I was taking a vacation with all of them. I am so blessed to know so many people there. It made the trip so much more enjoyable. Thanks to everyone who came out and hung with me, showed me around, and let me crash at the places, you’re the reason my trip was so epic. Seeing all these people would have been great in itself, but getting to experience HK with them was even better. Outings like the “junk” (boat) trip for May’s birthday, the trip to Ocean Park with new friends Benita & Felix, hiking up to Lion’s Rock with Dan, many meals shared with friends & family, all made 100 times better because of the great company I shared them with. Again, stay tuned for more details on these outings in future posts.

I’ll leave you with my thought of the day, mastercard style: Having time off, good. Taking a vacation in your time off: great. Sharing your vacation with friends and family, priceless.

PS For a less detailed event by event hits of my trip, check out my twitter page.

Now I finally have someplace to share all my photos! Alas, the free photo services just didn’t cut it for me. Either having limited disk quotas or limited resolutions, none of the free services on the web were up to my liking. With the freedom I have now with no space or bandwidth limitations, I’m free to share as many and as large of photos as I want! Only thing is, I need find a good photo management system or make one myself first (which is highly unlikely). So, hopefully in the coming weeks and months, I’ll slowly get my photo collection online to share with the world.

Feel free to comment and suggest anything for my website!

So I’m in St. Louis now for the tri-annual Urbana conference. Except I’m not quite there yet. As told in the title, I’m in the lobby of my hotel, leeching off the free wireless right now. My hotel room isn’t quite ready yet, so I’ve got some time to kill. So what am I going to do? Boast.

I’ve got the best friends world. I don’t know if I say this enough, but I am so blessed to have the friends that I do. For example, take 12 days ago. Just another average middle of exam period day. Trying to study during the day, had a meal together with the housemates, and had a great worship team practice at church that evening. But unbeknown to me, there was going to be more in store that night. Even though they were apparently so loud, I didn’t notice 15 or so friends congregating on the floor below me while I studied. Sometime that night (not really sure, I think it was around 10, but who knows), Tianne comes up and lures me away from studying with a cheese break. Who can say no to cheese? So I go downstairs and I’m greeted with a “cheesecake”, wine, fruit, chocolate fondue, and some of the greatest people in the world for a surprise birthday party. Absolutely floored. I wasn’t expecting it but it was awesome. Really made my day. Like I said, I’ve got the best friends in the world. Thanks guys, you have no idea how much you all mean to me!

Back at work on Tuesday. Almost done, couple more weeks. Pretty uneventful since Tuesday except for last night. Went out to eat with Niki, Gizelle, Jon Shui & Andrea after worship practice at Thai Paradise. Perfect weather for eating on the patio. Great idea Jon! I even got a free meal out of it. All I had to do was eat the remaining hot sauce. mmmm….paid for that today in the washroom…ah well, it was worth it.

Testing out this new browser, Flock. An all in one browser where I’m suppose to be able to blog and post photos right from the browser directly. So far so good.

Gonna sign off with a hilarious article found today: Optimus Prime

EDIT: Forgot to post this, if any of you are interested in seeing more Brazil pics, check out some of the other team members’ pictures here:

Chris: Chris’s Brazil Photos
Kathy: Kathy’s Brazil Photos
Ling: Ling’s Brazil Photos
Luisa: Luisa’s Brazil Photos, Luisa’s Pre-Brazil Photos

These are probably more interesting than mine too since some have captions. I’m always too lazy to put captions in.

Well, it’s been 3 days since I’ve gotten back from Brazil. I’m not really much darker (if at all), a little tired (but catching up on rest), but definitely still amazed at the great things that happened during the trip. I can’t say that it’s been a life changing experience where I will be taking whole new outlook on life and be heading in a new direction with God, but I do think I have learned a few things and maybe just changed slightly. First, recap and pictures!

8 of us (Caspian, Teresa, Kathy, Ling Chee, Teresa, Luisa, Chris, and I) headed out on Air Canada flight 90 late at night on July 8 for São Paulo. It was a pretty uneventful flight, but it was fun to be a witness to Ling’s and Kathy’s first time on an airplane. The food was pretty good too. I don’t know why people don’t like airplane food, I’ve always thought it’s pretty good.

The team at Pearson before our flight

After a 10 hour flight, we got into São Paulo the next morning (Sunday) around 10 am local time (Sao Paulo is only an hour ahead of us). There we were greeted by “Fan Goh” and proceeded to stuff our luggage into his church’s van to head to Cabo Verde church. We met up with our other team members, the Loh siblings (Nat, Karissa, & Justina) there and joined in the youth service there. We met a lot of the youth plus Vincent and Rebecca, the adults who we would be working with at the camp. A great time there as we sang Portuguese worship songs (we even did “I Could Sing Of Your Love Forever in Portuguese”) and all shared with the youth why were in Brazil or our testimony. Many of the youth there spoke English, so there were no problems in communicating. We had our first taste of Brazilian food here! mmmm…feijão (beans). This was also the first time we encountered the Brazilian way of greeting people: with hugs and kisses! Quite different to the grunts and simple hellos here in Canada.

The whole team reunited at Cabo Verde

After some pictures, we then proceeded to head to what eventually became our home for the next 3 days: the church in São José dos Campos. São José is about an hour outside São Paulo, so it took us a bit of time to get there. But that was perfect for most of us as we were tired from the flight. I believe most of us slept most of the way (I was in a different car than the rest of the team with Nat & Ling) but I know Ling was sleeping the whole way. Her head kept bobbing from side to side and a couple of times hit my shoulder pretty hard. I’m surprised she didn’t wake up. It was all pretty amusing.

When we got to the church, we met even more youth that we’d be going to the English camp with. More hugs and kisses all around! We joined their youth service where we worshiped some more in Portuguese and some of us shared our testimonies. Props to everyone who shared in Cantonese! After the service, it was time for more Brazilian food! More beans and rice! But not just any beans, feijoada, a black bean stew. mmmm…soo good! The church made so much of this, we ended up having it practically every meal till Tuesday. No complaints from me! We did some grocery shopping that night for the next few days that night at the local 24 hour supermarket. It’s also where I got my Brazilian Havaianas flip-flops and we got our week’s supply of guaraná, the Brazilian soft drink.

Justina and I sampling the Brazilian cuisine

The Teresas playing with twins Thomas and Nathan

The next few days before camp started on Wednesday, we did some last minute preparations and went over everything with the youth leaders at the church. It was great getting to know a lot of the youth. We also got to do some shopping and went out for dinner a couple of times. On Tuesday we went to some of the shops in downtown São José with some of the youth. I gotta admit, not exactly the most exciting time for me. Everyone except for me and the Loh siblings bought so many flip-flops. I think they ended up buying something like 30 pairs. Insane! After that, we went to an all you can eat pizza place with the Brazilians. Wow, that was good. I was sitting with Jeanine, Fan Goh’s daughter, and even though she didn’t know much English and I not much Portuguese, we had a great time trying out all the different kinds of pizza and both found out how much we both love the banana pizza.

Kathy & Justina modeling their friendship coconut rings

Caspian figuring who owes whom how much amongst the 30 flip-flops

mmm…banana and chocolate pizza

Yushi (one of the youth leaders) showing his feminine side

The main part of the trip, English camp, started the next day on Wednesday. We all boarded a coach bus to head to the camp site. But before that, we had lunch, complete with beans, rice, meat and a new Brazilian treat: assai (a-sigh-eee), a delicious Brazilian fruit smoothie kind of drink. No one from Canada really liked it all that much, but I loved it! It took us about an hour to get the the camp site, but when we got there, it was gorgeous!!! I had seen some pictures of it before the trip, but seeing it first hand was amazing. It was more like a resort than a camp site. It had a dining building, meeting hall, separate dorms for guys and girls, a pool, a football (real football, not American football sillies) field, an outside BBQ hut, and a beach volleyball court. We unpacked, set up and started what would be some of the best days in my life.

The beautiful site of English camp

Over the course of the next 3, 4 days, we helped run the English camp. The theme of the camp was “Don’t Waste Your Life” base on the book by John Piper. All the preparation that we had been doing over the last 4 months was finally being used. Each day was packed with all sorts of activities: gymnastics (learning new dance moves to wake us up), devos, musical worship, large group sessions, games, meals, English classes, small group time, testimonies and more.

Each of us from the Canadian team helped lead devos in small groups each morning which was quite an experience for me. They went kind of slow because of the translation that needed to be done, but the most challenging thing for me was the size and age of my group. While most groups were at most 6, 7 people, my group ended up being 12 people. I guess it was because we had 2 other Brazilian leaders in my group, but it was still quite large. Not only that, but the age was very young, I had many 10 year olds and even a 7 year old. This was bit a of a challenge for me as we had designed the devos for teenagers in high school and they were quite deep. I did my best to simplify the devos but also not to dumb it down or for it to lose its meaning and purpose. With that said, I was amazed at the way many of then responded to the devos. Many great answers were to given to some of my questions and one morning, one of the 10 year olds, Steven, opened up the devo time in prayer! Speaking of being amazed by the youth, one of the campers, Julia, who is only 12, shared her testimony in front of everyone! Now, when I was 10 and 12, I would have never dreamed of praying out loud nor would I have shared in front of 50 other people that included my friends and peers. I was so touched by their willingness and openness to share with all of us. Best part of camp was when there was an alter call on Friday night and 3 people came to Christ for the first time! Hallelujah!

There was a lot other fun stuff that happened too. One of the highlights was the game we did with the campers on Friday. We had designed a six station circuit course where each team would receive points depending on how much they could do in 5 minutes at each station. Some of the stations were torturous. For example, at one station, each team member would go one at time and first bob for an apple (thus getting their face wet), then fish a small Worther’s candy out of a plate full of flour with their mouths (thoroughly coating their face with flour) and then take 5 huge bites out of a watermelon. It was hilarious! Another highlight was the Canada-Brazil football matches we had on the last day of camp (Saturday). In the first match, we managed to hold the youth to a 0-0 draw! Woohoo! We were pretty proud of ourselves. But then in the second game, we got slaughtered 3-0 (keep in mind these games were only 15 minutes long, so if we had gone full time, it probably would have been like 18-0). So many more stories and things to say, but I’ll save that for telling you guys face to face.

Phe getting his bandana put on during team flag making time on the first night

Kelly sharing her testimony

The campers lining up for a game on the football field

The results of the watermelon station during the circuit game

Geoffry coming out from the water drinking station during the circuit game

Kathy, Teresa, & Luisa posing with the snazzy new hats we received from the Brazilians

English Camp 2006: Don’t Waste Your Life

Ling chilling on a swing

Overall, camp was a huge success. The weather was wonderful, it was loads of fun, and most importantly, God was experienced. Along with the 3 campers that came to Christ, many other Christians seemed to have renewed their passion for Him. It was an unbelievable 4 days that I’ll never forget.

During the last 3 days, the Canadian team got some time to ourselves. We did some more shopping, had some churrasco (Brazilian BBQ), and got to spend a night at the camp’s speaker’s (Pastor Hsiang) missionary place. Shopping on Sunday was really cool. We went to an outdoor market in São Paulo where they had all sorts of cool Brazilian jewelry, stone carvings, clothes, wood carvings and other knick-knacks. It really was a true Brazilian experience. Then for supper, we went to a churrascaria with the speaker and his family where they bring huge skewers of BBQ’d meat to your table and cut it right there for you. They even let us go in the kitchen to see how the cook the meat and go to take some pictures.

Yours truly carving some meat

That night, we went to the speaker’s missionary place to spend the night. It’s a really cool place in the southern part of the greater São Paulo area. The speaker and his wife had a dream a few years back to create this place in Brazil that would train missionaries in Brazil to go out, house missionaries (like me and the team) that would come to Brazil and just be a place for him, his family and staff to serve missionaries. Well, that dream has come to life and it was really cool to be able to spend time with him and his family and to hear of all the things God has been doing with their ministry. God’s kingdom truly is all over the world.

God’s glorious creation on Monday morning at Pastor Hsiang’s missionary site

Pastor Hsiang and his son Caleb at the fishing pond at the missionary site

On the Monday afternoon, we went to downton São Paulo to do yet some more shopping but I can’t say I enjoyed this part all that much either. We basically spent the whole afternoon in a 4 story mall full of “fan ban” stores. Only thing was, it was basically the same ten, 30 square foot stores over and over again, selling fake shoes, jerseys and clothes. Justina, Kathy, & I got a little bored of this so we went out on the street and had some cheese bread and fresh pineapple. mmm…that was so much better than walking around the stores. When we got back to São Jose that night, we just chilled with the youth, talking and playing some simple, fun games that the Brazilians taught us. The youth also gave us sooo many parting gifts. I couldn’t believe how many personalized cards, notes, and bookmarks I received from them. It was really tugged at my heart.

The unbelievable outpouring of love from the youth

Tuesday was a sad day: the day we left Brazil. After being in Brazil for a week and a half and building up friendships and bonds that we’ll never forget, it was a tearful goodbye at the airport. It sucked saying goodbye, but I was also kind of looking forward to being home again. It was really cool how so many of the youth came to the airport to see us off. Their hearts for God, each other, and us is something I’ll always remember.

Ling and Teresa with their unique “using the telephone” pose

Ling and Jeanine saying goodbye at the airport

So that was the trip. So what did I learn? Well, like I mentioned in my previous post, I learned just how strong the bond and unity we have in Christ.

There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called— one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

Also, I learned what it exactly means to love one another. The way the Brazilians welcomed us, let us stay in the homes and church, gave us small tokens of appreciation, just the way they plained loved us so much even though they hardly knew us at first. It was amazing. Truely a huge blessing from God to experience His love through them.

I also learned that Toronto may be where God is calling me to stay. As great as it was in Brazil, I found myself missing Toronto. And even though I’ve told a lot people that I would prefer to settle down in a small city/town and that Toronto would be one the last places I’d live, I finding myself having a heart for Toronto more and more. Kind of cool how God can change your heart. Lastly, I did learn something about myself totally unrelated to the trip that I won’t share right now. Kind of personal and not ready to share yet, maybe sometime in the future.

One last thing, two friends told me two things directly before and after the trip that have lingered with me: “change the world” and “You’re really flexible, you’re really good for missions.” hmmmm…interesting. Change the world, eh? Well, I don’t know if I or the team changed the world, but I do think some people were touched by God through us down in Brazil (just as we were touched by them). Don’t know if I’ll ever change the world, but that’s definitely a nice goal to have. About my flexibility, I guess I am pretty flexible, going with the flow of things, never letting anything really faze me, I guess those are things needed to do missions. Who knows, maybe God will call me to some sort of longer term missions sometime in the future. I hope I’ll be open enough to hear the call.

Whew! Wow, that was like a novel. If you read through all this, kudos to you for sticking it through. Just want to thank everyone again who supported me and the team in prayer.

Jonathan, out.