Fun and Games

I'm really enjoying the evening game times we've been having. I've played some Foosball, taught some people 3-13, and learned a new game called Yoniv. I hope they continue to happen at least every once in a while even as things get busier.

Yesterday I went running/jogging with a few other students. I'm not much of a runner so I set myself a goal of jogging for 15 minutes and then I walked for the rest of the time. I think the others ran from 30-60 minutes. I'm thinking about running more since it seems like most of the other students doing Discovery are in pretty good shape, but the students I've been running with get up 2 hours before breakfast so they can run for an hour and still have time to shower, etc., and I'm not sure if it's worth missing that much sleep or if I can motivate myself to run at a different time. I didn't get up this morning because I stayed up too late last night to get up at 6am. I think I'm going to have to compromise between evening activities, sleep, and running, and maybe only run a few days a week. I don't really love running, but it's probably good for me.

Yesterday was Sunday so we had our own church service here at the Bible school. The services in the local towns are all in Swedish, but we are allowed to go to them instead if we want to and there will be a few Sundays where the whole school will attend three different churches. It will be interesting to see what cultural differences are obvious and what might be attributed to differences in denomination. In the service here, we sang a few contemporary songs with a piano and guitar accompaniment; I'm guessing they'll add more instruments if students volunteer to play them, although I'm not sure what else the school owns and I don't think many people brought them from home.

In the afternoon we played a game called "Burn Ball" which is sort of like baseball but played with a tennis ball. Instead of throwing the ball to a base, you always thrown it to a designated person in the middle of the bases. There are no outs; if you get caught between bases when the 'burner' gets the ball, it's a point for the outfield team and you go back to the last base you came from. You can have as many people on each base at a time that you want and every person on your team bats once each inning. The bats are much smaller than baseball bats and you throw your own ball into the air to hit it rather than being pitched to. The outfield team gets five points for catching a pop fly with one hand and three points for catching it with two. The scoring was mostly confusing because it wasn't always easy to tell how many people got burned each time. It was a lot of fun though, and I liked the fact that there weren't any outs so everyone got to bat and run. After that I learned another new game called J-Rock, which is apparently a Holsby tradition, with is similar to hand ball or ultimate frisbee; you pass a soccer ball down the field by throwing it and you can't walk or run when you have the ball. You scoring by passing the ball to a teammate who has to head it into the goal. The other teams tries to gain possession by hitting the ball to the ground or catching it.

In the evening we played a few get-to-know-you kind of games like "I've never..." (only we played "I have...". Then we hung out in the lounge and played games until it was time for bed.

This morning we had our year overview and orientation, which answered a lot of questions about assignments, the Bible readings (we are going to be reading through the whole Bible this year), memory verses, curfew and other rules, schedule (although that's still pretty fuzzy), and travel weekends. I think some stuff we're just going to have to ask about as it comes along since some things I'm not sure what to even ask about yet. Our RA, Elizabeth or EJ, seems to have the answers to most questions and she's easy to talk to so that's nice.

In about half an hour I have my Discovery Orientation. There are eight students doing Discovery; I was surprised there weren't more, but I found out that they cap it at eight so now I feel even more privileged to be a part of it. There are four girls: Emelie from Sweden, Danielle from BC, Melanie from Germany, and myself. There are also four boys: Christopher from Germany, Erik and Stephen from Alaska, and James from Manitoba.

There are a lot more students from Canada than I was expecting, probably even close to half; there are quite a few Americans and Germans, two Swedes, one or two from Austria, one from Romania, and few from a collection of other countries. Although many of the students come straight from high school, there are a handful who are around my age. It's kind of nice, though, that age doesn't really seem to matter to most relationships. It's one of the 'introductory' questions you ask a lot of the time but then usually forget pretty quickly.

TTFN :)