Little Blue Book

I have a little blue book, which tells me I am an American. No, that isn't entirely meant, that my passport alone identifies me as an American. I have met many people in my life who have literally grown up in other countries and cultures and the only thing American about them is their passport. This is often the result of America's unique law, that if you are bown on American soil, you become an American citizen.

In fact if there is one thing i HAVE learned in China it is that I am more American there than i have been at any time in my life. In Europe I always felt like i COULD fit in; if i dressed appropriately, refrained from smiling, watched my language, I could probably get away with people not guessing my nationality. But in China there is no hiding the fact of who I am- no possibility of fitting in. Dismaying at first, but in a way very freeing.

So anyways- this little blue book. More than anything else, it has accompanied me on my journeys, since Apr 29, 1999. It is fraying, the picture is bulging out and looks doctored as a result of my passport having been in my pocket in numerable bus journeys, gotten wet in the rain, gone on camping trips, etc... It is chock full of various stamps and visas. It has been appended twice now, and the little book isn't so little anymore, but its also in pretty bad shape. I had trouble leaving both Romania and Poland with it this week.

So I intended to go to Vilnius to get a new passport. The Lithuanian embassy is i think america's most accessible and friendly embassy in the world, and i love doing stuff here. Normally its no problem to get a new pasport. one catch- my chinese visa, which i need to reenter china, is in my old passport. China does not accepted still valid visas in invalid passports- something all the sane countries of the world accept, so naturally China doesn't. So I can't get a new passport, until I get to China.

Getting a new one China not only requires taking up to four days off work, to negotiate the 24 hour train ride to Shenyang for the all of 20 minutes a week that the American embassy is open to the public, but also presents me with another problem. I have to get a new Chinese visa 2 weeks after my arrival in China. Not enough time to get a new passport. And if i get the new visa in my same old passport, then I am stuck again in the same situation- i can't get a new passport without jeopardizing my right to return to China.

So my only hope is for accomodating border guards for the rest of 2007. I will have to some how smile my way along on my old passport until at least July, the first chance I will have of returning to the US, getting a new passport, and if I return to CHina, applying for a Chinese visa, also in the united states, even though it is MUCH more difficult there. I am caught in a teufelskreis that i can't get out of.

So pray for the integrity of my little blue book. It has been a faithful little companion to me :)

Eu nu vorbesc romana....

Right now i am sitting in an internet cafe, in Chisinau, Moldova. Alone. Things aren't so bad really- there is a lot of interest among Moldovan students for LCC, I just heard an amazing band of Moldovan folk music, and ate a really good meal of traditional Moldovan food. Yet I guess the phrase that describes how i feel best right now is "stretched too thin"... I think i have seen and experienced too much in too short of a time, and for one of the few times in my life, I am hit right now by an intense longing for a home. Where would that be? Yanji kind of, but i think i would be lonely there too this time of year. Klaipeda? The closest I have, and in fact it was hard to be ripped away after only a week in Lithuania and after such a warm reception to move on to Romania so quickly. Am glad i have a couple more weeks there! Lansing? Also many people I love there, but all are busy with their own lives, and were I there, i would also be a perpetual 'guest'. Traverse City? I love my parents and the countryside there, but i also don't have a life there. I guess maybe the best we Christians ever are on this earth are 'guests' and 'pilgrims'. a recurring theme on this blog i know....

Romania

Being in Bucuresti, it was a bit hard to believe that it entered the EU already. Seems a bit rushed, but just from outer appearances. The city is pretty haphazard, and i guess it reminded me more of Yerevan than anything else, except without the cafes or the mountains, but replete with many monumental buildings made of a kind of golden stone, thanks to Caecescu and a long tradition before him. I remember always hearing, from way back, stories from Nick and Carissa Minaar about Romania, and it is interesting to have finally seen it. Yes Caecescu's Casa Popului is gigantic, impressive, and a little bit sad when one considers how much it cost the Romanian peasant to build, and also the architechture that was destroyed to make way for the monster. Bulevardul Unirii may have been impressive in communist days, but now with the fountains dry, streets choked with crazy drivers, and random neon signs and billboards of every size and color, there is no word for it but ugly...

Driving across Wallachia, i was amazed at how visible Romanian geography is. there are three main parts, Wallachia, Transylvania and Moldavia. Wallachia is flat as a pancake and has no trees. So you can basically see all of it at once :) Then to the north are the snow capped tree covered mountains of transylvania. the border couldnt be more obvious. Moldavia (as opposed to Moldova) is made of long parallel valleys, still treeless. Romanian cities look much different than any other communist or eastern european cities i have seen. it is so fascinating how the elements are all the same, yet each former communist country has its own twist.

Entering the Moldovan Republic, after a relatively easy border crossing, the change was noticable, primarily in road quality, but Moldova, even in the dark, was incredibly hilly and covered with alternating thick forests and vineyards. Am very sad i wasn't able to see the countryside during the day! More to come about this trip later.


P.S. if only Korean were as easy to learn as Romanian- a fascinating Romance language with a huge slavic lexical influence (eu citesc = 'I read' treba = 'need'), postpositions borrowed from Turkish (studentul = 'of the student', studentilor = 'of the students'), and interesting high vowels. Also there is a crazy sound correspondence whereby what are velar consonants in most romance languages become labials in Romanian! {lakte(Lat.)=lapte(Rom.), okto(Lat.)=oapte(Rom.)}

2006

2006 began with fireworks over Tuetting and Starnberg on the Starnberger See, surrounded by teenaged campers, with prayer and worship, in southern Germany. 2006 also ended in Germany, surrounded by German teens and 20 somethings on a soggy ridge over looking Wermelskirchen, watching a thousand fireworks, drinking sekt, and praising God for what he is doing in that little German city.

The year began and ended very similarly. How has it changed me?

I have skiied the Austrian Alps

I have stared at the North Atlantic from Europe´s highest cliff in Ireland

I celebrated my birthday with amazing brothers at an Applebee's in Marion Indiana- with as fun a group as can be gathered on this earth

I led a small but very moving Alfa course in Klaipeda

I had all kinds of complicated situations with the opposite sex

I renewed my love of the State of Michigan

I saw the museum of the Armenian Genocide, the museum of the Forbidden City in Beijing, the museum of Georgian History

I ate in a real Irish pub, ate in the back of a little bus in Kazbegi Georgia with a bunch of orthodox teenaged guys, ate in the world's most exclusive shopping center, ate donkey, stingray, and squid on the streets of Yanji

I worshipped God in Korean, in Chinese, in Russian, in Georgian, in German, and in English

I stayed with the Watson´s in Tbilisi, with Jon in Shanghai, with Kathryn in Wuxi, with my parents for two months, in a dorm at IWU, in Nigel´s house in Kill Inney Ireland, in youth hostels, on Jari´s floor in Helsinki, in a tent along the Gauja, in a guesthouse on the island of Hiumaa, in my little room 1303 at YUST, in the Hull´s house in Lansing, at the Brinkmans´in Lansing, in a cabin on Lake Superior, with Doug in Nashville, with Josh in Nashville, on a boat on the gulf of finland.

I presented at a conference in Narva

I taught German, and Thesis, and Linguistics, and English conversation

I started this Blog

I flew to Nashville twice to be in weddings, and discovered a great church there, and was best man for the first time in my life

I had an amazing guy´s small group every thursday in our orange apartment at Janonio 16, with guys from 10 countries

I spoke in Estonian, Finnish, Latvian, Lithuanian, English, German, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Korean, French, and Spanish

I went to a Christian rock concert in helsinki, asia´s largest church in tbilisi, and the gigantic TSPM church in Yanji for Christmas

I carved a grapefruit for halloween, managed to find a scrap of turkey for Thanksgiving, watched fireworks over Grand Traverse Bay for the 4th of July, taught at LCC for valentine´s day, gazed at the proud skyscraper´s of beijing for mid-autumn day, had a cozy gathering at the Mueller´s apartment with my friends from YUST and some guests from the Silesian techinical school for Christmas.

I heard amazing teaching at the Exodus Conference, at Miesto Baznycia, at the Brueder Gemeinde in Wermelskirchen...

I have been really shaken to my core, stripped of illusions about myself, thrown into deep culture shock, tried and tested, and come out whole and breathing and living and still trusting God and still making the hard decision to follow him day by day.

I have shared the Good News about Jesus so many times in many different ways, everytime being amazed that i am bold enough to do that, and amazed that people actually are interested to hear about it

I have been blessed incredibly by my God and every person who has made my life possible, tenable, and rich- my family, my friends, my many supporters , my colleagues at LCC and at YUST...

Thank you LoRD for 2006... May i burn up for your glory as the Piper-lovers say, in the year 2007. Who knows what this year will bring? Bog ego znajet!

Wirtschaftswunder

Have you ever seen the movie Auberge Espagnol? I know i wrote about it on here once, but i recommend it. Right now i am sitting in the Schmittman Kolleg- what we in the US would call a CO-OP affilitiated with the university of köln. It was 10 degrees today (ive even lost track of how much that would be in fahrenheit- i pretty much think in Celsius now), and me and my friend Kai went to the museum of the history of the federal republic of Germany today. It was so interesting to see how Germany went from the bombed out ruin of WWII to the modern society it is today- a country that i love, and that seems to be to me in no way connected to those old movies and war doceumentaries i see. I just can't grasp that this is the same country that in those old films cheered on Hitler in throngs.

I have been really struck by the affluence and efficiency of Germany. I should have expected that I know, but it really seemed like the trip i took to get here was from one world to another. It just seems impossible to believe that i could set out from Yanji westward and end up in the Bergisches Land, with its beautiful streets, rolling lush green hillsides, slated-walled houses, cafes, konditereis, modern schools, order, peace, quite, affluence, tolerance, freedom, harmony. You can get to all those things just by driving? It really seemes to me like my plane trip must have been from one planet to another, instead of just around our little globe.

Even the crass excesses and contrasts and luxury of Dubai felt like a completely other world. The desert, the wealth, the bravado, the striving for ever more luxury, that felt foreign to me, although in some ways it felt much more like China- a country where the attempts to outdo and impress with overstated architecture are everywhere. One thing that really hit me about Dubai was that it is really a pan-asian city. No one group predominates. There are Filipinos, Malays, Chinese, Pakistanis, Dravidians, Hindis, Koreans, Russian Central Asians, Europeans, every shade of Asian, all speaking English in its various beautiful forms, all come together in a brand new city built out of nothing in the Arabian desert. I don't think any city in the world demonstrates the true heart and future of the English like Dubai does. English is the language of Asia, of Asians, accepted and transformed by them. It is only a matter of time before English ceases to be thought of as a European language, or even an American one. There are twice as many English speakers by some estimates in Asia as there are in the United States.

My good friend Mike, with whom I teach in China, is a big documentary fan, as am I, and in between our exam giving, exam grading, goodbye parties, Bible studies, etc... we watched several episodes of this gigantic 50 hour documentary on WWII. It has really struck me in the last few days how the world has changed since my grandfather fought in that war. The Germany today would be unrecognizable to Nazis- a multicultural bed of postmodernism and tolerance, the heart of the new enlarged multicultural EU. Where 60 years ago i might have had to stare at all these young Germans that i have been visiting and spending time with down the barrel of a gun, now i can hear their stories, play poker with them, worship Jesus with them, pray with them, play with them, love them and be loved by them. Mao TseTung is surely rolling in his grave as the capitalist paradises of Wangfujing in Beijing ring up their yuans in designer Armani boutiques with Haagen Dazs and Pizza Hut. The once grandiose Tiananmen square now feels outdated ugly and rundown, surprisingly devoid of traffic, in contrast with the new mgea skyscrapers and frenzied business of the new centers of that great economic giant. The Great Hall of the People, rather than impressing, just makes one feel sad and used and tired. The Arab world- in the time of those documentaries a backwater of sheikdoms and baksheesh is now the heart of a brand new economic boom, transforming all of Asia and calling the Asians to itself. THe prospect for Islam has never looked brighter, the influence and power of the Muslim world has never been stornger, and i highly doubt that in a worldly sense, that Christendom, in the old sense of the word, possess anything that can counter these new rising powers- China, the Arab World, etc...

The world has changed so drastically. To me it feels like it has shrunk completely. We have the freedom to just move around this earth, in peacetime, in a way that was unthinkable in the days of those old WWII documentaries that i watch with Mike.

Tomorrow night i go to Klaipeda, and complete my first circumnavigation of the world. A journey that started at the little Klaipeda Bus Station to the moving goodbyes of my friends, will soon complete itself. I will have come back to where i have started; but as ever the Journey is still underway, and will continue to drive me ever ever on, the way it drives all my brothers and sisters around the world, till we reach our Final Rest in our True Home.

Ok this blog has been sadly asleep for a long time i realize- a victim of the poor access to the Chinese internet and my own laziness. Hopefully now that i am on european soil, these green pages will be filled with overdue remarks and thoughts about my life in China... mal sehen... everyone makes those sort of resolutions.

on this first morning of 2007 i am sitting in a beautiful house in Dhünn Germany, rain falling on the shockingly green fields and rolling forests of the Bergisches land. My body clock could not be more messed up. I realize how lucky i am to lead the life i have been leading... Last night i stood on a rainy ridge watching fireworks shoot up from a thousand houses in the city of Wermelskirchen across the valley- the sky ablaze with red and green and gold in all directions, glasses of Sekt, conversations with newly met brothers and sisters, my stomach full of amazing and with-a-brand-new-appreciation enjoyed German dishes like Schichtsalat, tomato soup with basil, fresh bread, Marscapone with rasberries... The day before i was eating pitas from a lebanese fast food store in the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai, next to the world´s largest indoor ski slope (yes snow skiing in the Dubai desert, under the shadow of the world´s highest building). I swam in the Persian Gulf and smelled saltwater breezes and palm trees, and watched the sunrise over the Arabian desert behind the skyscrapers of dubai from a pier in the Persian Gulf. The day before that I was wondering the dusty streets of the Forbidden City in Beijing under the choking brown-gray haze that is the Chinese sky, eating chachangmien in the backstreets of a chinese hutong, and wondering at the extreme contrasts and contradictions that are China.

I haven´t had time to process any of this, and over the last 3 days i have had 4 4-hour sleep periods, but I think i will adjust. I have some great appointments with brothers coming up in Germany, and i am VERY excited to get back to Lithuanian soil again, to see how much of that language i can still speak, to see my old friends. Even if it means i have to fly through wretched Frankfort Hahn airport. I am looking forward to getting there and having time to process and catch up to all the crazy adjustments i have been through.

See you in Lietuva!