A Long Update

For lunch on Wednesday, I decided to sit with some of the exchange students from Germany that I have seen a few times but not really had the chance to talk to. I’m not sure if they were excited to let me sit down or not, but they didn’t seem to mind too much :) I ate lunch with them and talked about all the differences between school in America and school in Germany. It was a scandal in Germany for the government to start charging 500 Euros a year in student fees because education should be free. I just smiled and said that I would be jumping for joy if the US charged each student only $800 a year to go to college. Also, if you fail Calculus I four times, you cannot ever graduate from a university anywhere in Germany, and that if you ever fail out of one major, you can never attempt it again in Germany. Heh :) I wonder how many people wouldn’t have degrees if that was the rule in the United States. After we finished lunch and two of them had to leave, I was invited to get coffee with Zani and Patrick where we continued discussing differences in politics and construction and governmental practices between Germany and the United States. I’m glad that I’m not only learning about the cultural differences between Thailand and the US, but also about lots of other countries.

The kickoff party on Wednesday night was a success! There are only three Christian students involved in Grapevine with another twenty or so Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim students that come to activities on a regular basis. I don’t think that all twenty students were able to come, but nonetheless, we had close to fifty people at the party! :D I met a lot of students that had never heard of or been to a Grapevine activity until they received the flyers we passed out on Monday and Tuesday night before the kickoff. It was exciting to see how excited they were to be there and despite not knowing a lot of other friends there (Thai people like to do things in groups), they had a good time.

We started the evening with some snacks and small group games like Uno and Pente. It’s funny how what seem like simple games we play all the time are very difficult to explain :) I met two new girls who had never been to Grapevine named Ham and Gift while playing Uno. Then we had live music performed by some of the staff including Jack Johnson and Dido. After that, we moved into large group games. We played “I’m awesome, and you’re awesome too, if…” and the person in the middle finishes the sentence with a fact about themselves. If the fact is also true about you, you have to change spots with someone else in the circle and the last person in the middle is the next to make a statement. The best was when a girl said “I’m awesome, and you’re awesome too, if … you are beautiful” and quite a few of the guys changed places in the circle :P To bring everything back together, we had some more live music with one of the Muslim students named Anas singing. All of the girls were wooing over his great voice :D We then introduced the staff and what Grapevine is about and the activities that go on every week. I was sitting with a different group of girls that had never been to Grapevine, and it was encouraging to see how eager they were about coming to Fun on Campus (games and cookies near SIIT on Mondays and Thursdays around lunchtime), Souper Tuesdays (family style meal with soup, games, worship music, Bible study and prayer), and Love Your Neighbor (teaching English to kids living in the slums of Bangkok on Sundays). And finally, you have to end the night with karaoke, of course! I attempted singing a Thai song with a girl named Mae, but she completely dropped the ball and forgot the melody… not that my here and there Thai butchering of words were much better :P

The party started around 6pm but there were still students (even ones that had never come before) there until 11pm helping us wash dishes and mop the floors. All we can do now is pray that the new students will have a desire to come back and join in more Grapevine activities and that the students already involved are growing towards having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

On Thursday night, I went down to Bangkok with another exchange student I met in my Thai studies class from Germany named Julia. We walked around for a while looking for the restaurant and eventually found it after walking a full circle around Victory Monument. We ate cheeseburgers at a place called Saxophone that had live jazz music every night. I really enjoyed being able to go and listen to the music as well as form a better relationship with Julia. I’m going to the weekend market with Julia and Pu today, and hopefully they will join me to a cookout at our church afterwards.

Yesterday was pretty chill. I was a bit stressed out about trying to find classes that would transfer to Georgia Tech, get responses back from my advisors, and register for them before add/drop ended, but it’s all over with now :D I ate lunch again with Fang, Faang, Mae, Once, and a few other freshmen. Hopefully I’ll be able to get them out of their dorms a little more in the coming weeks :P Before watching some episodes of 30 Rock with Matt, Chris, and Cat, we went to 7/11 to buy a few snacks and use their microwave to pop my popcorn. I guess they don’t have microwave popcorn here, but one of the guys that worked at 7/11 kept stopping our popcorn thinking it was going to explode because of the popping noise. It was very amusing trying to explain to him that it was supposed to do that :) After that we joined Goi, Mae, Buck, and a girl named Amy at a nearby coffee shop. Amy is from southern Thailand, graduated from SIIT, and was one of Mae and Buck’s friends when they were exchange students here in 2003. She was the first person to become a Christian through the Grapevine ministry. It was exciting to meet her and to see how the ministry has grown since then.

Here are a few names to be praying for:
Leon, Zani, Patrick (German students)
Ham, Gift, Aum, Pouy, Prae, KoKo, Long, Ton, Ing, Bell (people I met at the kickoff)
Julia, Pu (Thai studies girls)
Fang, Faang, Mae, Once (some of the freshmen)
Matt, Chris (exchange students from Tech)
Cat (summer intern)
Buck, Mae, Goi, Greg, Allison, Andy, Mic (staff with Grapevine)
Amy (first Thai Christian at Grapevine)