Going to Church in China

This morning Jackie and I embarked on an adventure to go to the church that Sa Jia Li Ya's been attending in Beijing. Beijing International Christian Fellowship is a church for foreigners only (I showed my passport to get in), and Chinese nationals can't attend. We walked across campus and took a bus to the general area, except a) we were both wearing unfortunate shoe choices and b) the directions to the church were confusing because there are about 348902849038209 bazillion streets with the same name. So it was a little bit of an arduous journey. Bu hao!

We finally managed to get there like 5 minutes before the service...BICF actually reminded me a lot of PCC in Rochester. It definitely had the sort of large interdenominational vibe, which I suppose is the sensible way to go with such a diverse congregation. There was a lot of singing before the sermon, and we even did a Chinese song, which was interesting. They put up both the phonetic lyrics and the characters, so I could pretty much tell the meaning of the words by the characters, which was cool. After all the walking and feet pain and getting lost though, I was mostly looking forward to just sitting down and listening to the message. The speaker was really good, although I think there's a rotation of who preaches. The sermon was on 1 Corinthians 12, but he angled it towards our specific audience, talking about how it applied to foreigners and relating to life in Beijing. It was very relevant, and I think I'd go back there, although I'm interested in seeing what other Beijing churches are like, particularly the state-sponsored ones. It's an interesting environment here for religion. After the service we got lunch with some other girls who are studying abroad at Beida (although not in my program), and we rode back to campus together and I learned that there's a small group Bible study on campus, so I'll probably check that out sometime, although this next weekend there won't be any churchly things in my life as we're going on the big CIEE trip to Xi'an. From which, by the way, we get back at like 7 am Monday morning. And I have class at 8. Ouch...I hope I can get enough work/sleep accomplished on the train.

This afternoon I took a delicious nappy-nap and bummed around. I met with my tutor tonight! She is fabulous. She helped me study for my 4 zillion quizzes tomorrow, aka three (one in every class! hen hao!). I studied some more tonight, and I'm feeling pretty good about my level of preparation for tomorrow...I hope there's not any work that I was supposed to do and missed hearing about. It's a constant threat when the teachers are speaking all quickly-like in Chinese.

I am all kinds of sleepy right now...I hope my staying up late this weekend didn't destroy my awesome old-person sleeping schedule forever.