In training...

ooh I have a cold *sniffle sniffle*.

This is what happens when you push yourself to the point of silliness and beyond. But since I prefer to whine to you all in person, I'll skip that and write about my MAYT training weekend. Firstly, MAYT is the mission team that I'm going with to China. We'll be teaching english for a week or so as well as visiting other missions. I was in charge of organising this weekend, so here's some snapshots of what the weekend was like.

Sat 9am: smoke fills building as boys try to cook pancakes

Sat 10am: Language teacher Vera has all 10 of us saying 'Ni hao!'

Sat 10:15am: Steve is in the depths of despair.

Sat 10:30am Steve is mangling the sentence 'I speak only a little Chinese'. I reassure him it gives it authenticity anyway.

Sat 12 noon: Steve is singing all the words we learnt in one long sentence to some tuneless melody, while strumming 3 chords on the guitar.

Sat 2pm: Everyone's eyes are now glazed over. Language Teacher Vera decided that for a bit of wrap up, we should talk about the toilet hygiene in China (none - BYO paper).

Sat Dinner: Chinese Banquet - an awful lot of 'what is this?' and 'you eat it first!'.

Sat night movie: To get culturally ready, we watched crouching tiger, hidden dragon. In a long tender moment where Chow Yun Fat has just declared the peace his love brings to his soul against a backdrop of bamboo and stone, I hear a 'Yeah, peace - and boredom!'. Girls vote that 'Dark Cloud' the Mongolian warrior is a spunk.

All in all, I think we've adequately prepared, don't you?