Beads and other things...

We are trying to plan a chapel service for this Friday. Part of the service will involve giving each student a bracelet with different colored beads on it. Each color will represent some part of the Gospel message. Yellow-God created everything perfect, Black-sin, Red-Jesus' blood on the cross, White-forgiveness in Christ, Green-growth in faith, and Yellow-eternal life. (And yes, we repeated Gold).

To do this we needed to purchase the beads and string to make the bracelets. So Michelle asked a national to help us find a good store where we could purchase these supplies. Let me preface that our last chapel planning involved using technology and it ended up being an enormous hassle, but that could be a story for a different time.

Last night we went to find the store, all ready to start making our beads. Of course we got on the street and could not find the store that matched the character's in the name we had written down. So we wandered the street looking for the place to buy these beads. We finally come across the bead store, very excited that we can proceed with our bead buying. Of course when we get into the store they do not have all of the same sizes for the 5 basic colors we needed. In fact, they had about 3 different sizes for the 5 colors that we needed. Furthermore, it appeared as thought all of the beads could only be purchased in small packages of 7 or 8 (we need over 200 bracelets for chapel).

This was rather frustrating, but we rolled with it. In my broken Chinese I tried to communicate what we needed and that we required more beads than the small packages had. The situation took some more time than we had planned but, eventually we purchased materials that would suffice. Not ideal, but I mean why would a bead store have 5 of the same colored, same sized beads, right? Ah, the wonders of planning chapel!

We walked out of the store to go buy some dumplings for supper, satisfied that we would be able to actually make the bracelets. As we rounded the corner to go to the food stand, I saw a big sign with red characters. I looked at it closely to discover that those characters were the characters for the bead store we had originally been looking for. Ugh! We went to the wrong store, and did not even know it.

As supper was being purchased Michelle went to that store to see if the supplies were more fitting for our needs. And of course, that store also failed to have the 5 same sized beads with the five basic colors that we needed. So it had made no difference which store we went to, but was definitely something I can laugh about.

Ok, that is a story was just another crazy experience of trying to purchase things in Taiwan. I should share more stories on my blog, and will attempt to do this in the future. For now, it is way past my bedtime, and I still have 40 Senior 1 tests to check tomorrow. I would like to finish those before I get the 100 Senior 2 tomorrow afternoon. I must say I continue to have appreciation for all of those teachers I had in high school English, and upper level history classes at Iowa State. Reading all of those essays and paragraphs can get a little taxing.

Peace!

Mark