Rice Grains

Sunday morning we headed to the church nearby, where Anita and I were invited to share a Bible story in English with the children in Sunday School. We had decided to have them help act out the story of Peter and John and the lame man at the temple. Absolutely no one volunteered, and when I asked one guy to help, he shook his head no, so we just read the story and then taught them a song to go with it.

After the children's service, which is actually a community outreach, the children were served pizza and ice cream floats to celebrate some birthdays. Anita and I were each given a piece of very delicious Pizza Co. pizza.:) Mmmm, haven't had pizza in months!

The church service started at 11:00, and Anita and I enjoyed the very musical service. Below are videos of some of that music.

Gye Hwa's husband preached a sermon about Hannah and Samuel; a young translator was assigned to help understand the message. I have a picture of her later. Here is Pastor Lee.

After the service, everyone ate lunch together. Anita and I were assigned to a table with our young translator, a really sweet gal who speaks excellent English. As we sat there, a young guy who played violin beautifully (and played on the worship team) joined us, fiddling around on a guitar. At our request, he retrieved his violin and played us some numbers. He says he started taking lessons at age 7; he is now 19 and getting bored with violin.:) He also plays piano, cello, and a bunch of other stringed instruments. Below are two videos of him playing violin, the first number is "Nearer My God to Thee", and the second is a favorite of his that he said is jazz??.

Here we are with Sanho and Hae-in. They are really sweet young people.

When we finally packed into the car, Gye Hwa and her husband drove us to a latex mattress store owned by some friends of theirs. The business is currently not open; other businesses in the community have been making problems for them, as I understood. But they are devout Christians and are praying about what to do.

They also have a small church that meets in the back of their store. It is a Burmese church; we were told that many Burmese immigrants have come to Phuket to find work, but that the companies they work for do not allow married couples to live together; men must stay together and women must stay together. However, this Korean couple has a few rooms that they provide for Burmese couples to live in. (I'm not sure I understand all the details because our conversations were in Thai and some broken English.:)

At any rate, I believe the reason we stopped at the store was so these friends could tell us how to get to a beautiful lookout point. They ended up piling into the car with us, and off we went. The first place we stopped is where this picture was taken.

From there we drove twisty, windy roads that eventually brought us up to where the following pictures were taken.

After hiking around for maybe an hour, we headed for home. Well, first we had to drop off the Korean family who helped us, and then we had to go pick up one of the children at someone's home, and then we had to pick up the other son at his friend's home, and then we stopped to eat supper at a Korean restaurant run by another church member. What a spread! But I didn't take any pictures of it, so you're spared from viewing yet another food pic.:)

Once at home we each simply relaxed and did our own thing, but right before everyone went to bed, I did manage to get a family picture. These are my dear friends, Gye Hwa and Bong Woo with their family.

That's pretty much the trip! We were taken to the airport this morning and arrived back in Samut Prakan about 11:00 am. It was a wonderful time, and Anita is a great travel companion.