Poor me.

Yeah, life out here is really rough. I just got back from a weekend in Turkey. We had to leave the country so that we could renew our visas. Oh boy, was it hard. I mean, with all of the beaches and coffee food and sunshine and people and a pool at our hotel and two meals a day in our hotel and sleeping in until two in the afternoon and the beautiful view from our hotel room (above)... I am surprised I made it. Actually, it was really great, It was such a change of pace over there. We got to just be tourists and not have to really worry about anything (except for having fun). And we did a lot of that.

One of my fellow students had her birthday while we were there. We went to a couple places to celebrate. The worst was this very touristy Turkish bar with live "music". There were two guys up on stage. One with a pony tail and one with glasses both with thick goatees and lots of back hair. They sang these incredibly depressing songs. It was no wonder we were the only ones in there. They seemed to be sharing a personal joke about how cheesy their "music" was. Half way through the "songs", one would kinda look at the other one while he was singing and start to chuckle. We were about to leave when they asked us if we had any requests. I think the requests where "something American", or "Stairway". Fortunately, they couldn't accommodate either of those requests. Unfortunately, they knew a Russian song and decided to play it. We stuck around for that and two other songs and then we couldn't stand it any more. We did end up finding some better places later on, but that was the most memorable.

Back here I have been challenged with some new things. I have lead worship a couple times (that's where you get up in front of people with your guitar and fumble through chords and murder songs while other people try to follow your lead). Yesterday one of the staff asked me if I would lead worship just two hours before the meeting that night. I accepted because I thought there would only be a couple of people there. So I learned some new songs (bad idea) and got the overheads together and was ready with five minutes to spare. Just about that time a team of 25 visiting Koreans showed up. The meeting ended up being about 35 people. This may not seem like very much to some of you, but trust me, it is. The really cool thing was that people really got into it. I did mess up a few chords and timing, but it really didn't matter. By that time, it was out of my hands.

The classes lately have been teaching a lot about "issues" that we all deal with. It has been good, but at the same time it is a little difficult. I feel like I am in constant therapy. I find myself using quack-talk and other psychobabble in regular conversation. We have been talking about all sorts of interesting things like, "anger", "frustration", and "attraction", and "feelings" and all sorts of crap like that. It has been hard but that's "okay". "We all feeeel like this sometimes". Ack!! There I go again! Okay, actually, it has been really cool. We all need a little (or lot of) work. Don't worry, we haven't had to talk to any puppets or anything.