Dragon Boats

If you've ever been to China, or are familiar with Chinese culture, you're probably familiar with the Dragon Boat Festival. If not, look it up, because I'm not planning on doing a Chinese culture lesson on my blog.   I just want to show you pictures.

On Saturday, Judah and I went to a Dragon Boat Festival in a nearby town for a few hours.  We got to see some awesome dragon boat races.

These are traditional dragon boats imported from Hong Kong.

Later on, we got to see all sorts of of Chinese folk arts: dancing, drumming, yo-yo-ing, and even some kung fu!

The "happy farmer" dance.

It's kind of hard to see. There were a lot of people.

This lion dance was performed by youth from a local kung fu club.

All of these were extremely enjoyable. But perhaps the highlight of the day was seeing some of our new friends.  As some of you know, Judah and I have been regularly attending a church for about a month.  Since it's a Chinese church, they had a booth set up at the festival, and we were able to see some of our new friends there.  They even shared their homemade dumplings with us!

Going to a Chinese church has been a very interesting experience for us.  We go to the English service. {我们的中文不好。Our Chinese is not good.} But there is still a lot of Chinese floating around.  Maybe we'll go to the Chinese service one of these days. The first two weeks we visited, I was really nervous about fitting in. Ask Judah. I was really nervous.  Of course people greeted us warmly, but we also received a few strange looks.  After all, while there are a decent amount of non-Chinese people there, it's still clearly a Chinese church. And we are most definitely not Chinese.

Once we ate dinner with the pastor, however, the ice was broken. Shattered. I wasn't so nervous anymore, and neither is anyone else.  Apparently people have been talking about us behind our backs: "Is it too early to invite them to dinner with us?" "Do you think they'd be interested in our fellowship?"  Everyone has been so welcoming and open-hearted.  This is exactly the kind of community we've been searching for.  It seems funny to me that I was so nervous.

We haven't "declared" it to be our home church yet, but every week, on the ride home from church, we decide to go back again next week, rather than visiting another church. We're even going to the young adult fellowship this week!

So, there you have it, folks: another snippet of our lives here. Thanks for reading! Now, I have to go write my lesson plan for tomorrow...