Gateway GPS

We'd only been here two days and were 'whisked off' to a fabulous youth camp just out of the capital. We had no idea what to expect but were blessed incredibly by our time there. We spent three days with about 100 awesome young people from 14 nations. Check out this list of nations with young Christians excited about sharing the message of Jesus with their peers - China, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, USA, India, Canada, Australia, Ukraine, Philippines, Kazakhstan, Korea, Columbia.

Gateway GPS - Go, Partner, Serve.

We were treated to good speakers with challenging messages, great conversations at mealtimes and throughout the days, much prayer for and with each other and the thrill of meeting and sharing life with so many young people fired up for Jesus.

All this with brilliant reminders of God's creation on all sides. 

  Feeling totally blessed and filled up.

Central Asia here we are.

48 hours here and we are already feeling at home. Its been an incredibly busy, interesting, stretching and special time with lots of people already. We arrived at 7pm on Sunday night, were taken out for dinner at an open air restaurant on a beautiful balmy evening, then it was off to the supermarket to buy some basics and then to our apartment, home for the next 6 weeks for me and 8 weeks for my travelling companions.

We are going to be very happy here. Nothing special but certainly all we need and more. I plan to take some photos and post them soon. 

Today's BEST adventure was to the bazaar with a beautiful young woman from our organisation whose English was good enough for us to make ourselves understood most of the time. Of course my Russian and Kyrgyz are both non-existent. The bazaar seemed to go on for miles and the atmosphere was much more friendly than I had expected.

 

 This lady was on for a chat and trying to practice her English as we engaged to buy some her of tasty sweet treats.

 

And I must say that a whole heap of fresh fruit and vegetables always delights my senses. Today was no disappointment.

 Dried fruits and every nut I can imagine. We bought salted, roasted broad beans to try. Probably not my fave.

This guy wanted me to photograph him holding some lepeshka, some of the local bread. Could I say 'No'? Hardly!

 

And I hadn't ever seen a table at a restaurant like this. Have you? Possibly only in Central Asia. We bought a pot of green tea and sat and enjoyed our edible market purchases here.

Two guys chatted with us (well, really to my companion who did all the translating) and both asked my age! It's just not what we do in Australia - ask the age of an older woman. When it happened the second time I said that it was unusual to ask an older person their age, especially when they did not know each other well. He apologised and said that he had meant to ask 'How are you?" and not 'How old are you?' Little differences make a big difference when it comes to communicating between languages. I guess that's why they call it a 'language barrier'!