Welcome to PlaaPlaaPlaa!

So you may be wondering why PlaaPlaaPlaa? What are those strange fish symbols above? What is ปลา and what does it mean? In short, this is a blog site, so surely there's going to be plenty of rambling. Unfortunately BlahBlahBlah was already taken, so I had to settle for the 'Plaa'. But there's actually more to it then just ramblings. The first fish symbol is actually a Christian symbol meaning ICTHUS - a greek acronymn which means "Jesus Christ is God's Son, the Saviour". The other strange letters you see in the last fish is actually the thai word for fish which funnily enough is pronounced "Plaa". So when you put it all together, this site is going to be my ramblings in telling people about how Jesus Christ is God's Son, the Saviour in Thailand (with plenty of good stories about food in between). Happy reading.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

What's been happening

After dropping my sister and her family off at the bus terminal last week, I suddenly realised that these past 2 weeks were the first time I've had some serious 'me' time since all the farewells began a couple months ago. As much as I love spending time with people, I must admit, it has been really nice to have a bit of time and space to myself. It's also been a good reality check of what life back here will be like when I finally find my own place to live. Not surprisingly, I've pretty much only had 1 proper night at home in the 2 weeks that my sister has been away...but hey, that's life :) So after conference, I was pretty stoked to finally be able to play my first songkran in Chiang Mai. Basically it's a festival that celebrates the Thai New Year and is a 3 day national waterfight which is perfect for our 40 degree days.
An Average day It's just nuts!! Awesome fun!! I went out on the sunday afternoon with some of my church friends and camped out on the moat so we could refill easily and shoot all the passers by and each other. Given how wet everything was, it was pretty hard to get any decent photos without a waterproof camera, so here are few shots from my phone in a plastic bag.
Boom & Preuk
the boys being targetted
Me and Boom If any of you decide to come to visit in April, I'll take you to play :) Or even if you don't like the crowds, we can do a quiet waterfight in the neighbourhood. Here's Seanie armed and dangerous with my water gun outside the house.
One of the highlights since getting back has been hanging out with my cell group friends again. Not only are they heaps of fun and do many random things (my type of people), but over the past couple years while I've been back in Australia, some of them have really grown in their understanding of the Bible and desire to know God and serve him. Last night I was given the job of leading the group through an intro to Acts. As freaky as it was to try and lead a study in Thai so early on, I was thankful for their patience with me in trying to explain things (not so succinctly) in Thai, and I was really thankful to see them gain a greater understanding to the background of Acts and see how Luke-Acts fits together. I know i've still got a LONG way to go with language and hopefully prepping studies will become quicker and easier in Thai as the months go by, but I was stoked to see them reading and understanding the Bible for themselves. Maybe the whole language thing might be a bit of a God send, cos it means that rather me doing all the talking and explaining, they're forced to look to the Bible more to get the answers! I just need to learn all the 'high language' vocab so I can understand all their answers! Here's us having dinner together last week for a Cell Group social
cell group dinner
High Tea Glof style For those who pray: - Praise God for some down time over the past couple weeks - Praise God for the opportunity to lead an intro study to Acts - Pray for me as I start prepping another to lead another study in Acts late May - Pray for me in my search for a place to live Here are a few other random photos from the past couple weeks
Being introduced to all sorts of food in CM
Finally eating Real Mango Sticky Rice!
Random night of Mango Sticky Rice by the river