Hong Kong Days 1 &2 (2012)

Hello Everyone!

Greetings from Hong Kong!  It has been a crazy couple of days so far.  I count our travel as a day, so I guess this is techincally our first day in Hong Kong.  We had a little bit of an ordeal traveling though, so I will talk about that first and then what we did today.

Day 1:

Everyone got to the airport on time, which was great.  We checked in, went through secuirity and didn't have any problems.  Our flight was delayed an hour or so, so we had plenty of time to wait.  After the wait, then we went to Chicago which is where it got complicated.  Our flight to HK was delayed by three hours which meant that we would be getting here about midnight.  In order to avoid that, Zach went to see if we could change flights.  The good news was that we were able to get on the Cathay Pacific flight to HK (An amazing airline, by the way) with one of our teammates who was traveling seperately, and we would get back to our hotel by 10:00pm or so.  The agent even said that she would take care of the bags where they would arrive with the previous flight we had, and then went it arrived at the HK airport, it would be sent to our hotel.  Everything went well and according to plan...but when we arrived and tried to confirm that with a representative here about our bags, they couldn't find the claim made for that.  That could have been because he didn't have a computer where he was stationed, so he said they would call us when that flight landed.  The plane landed, and our bags did not arrive.  We came to find out that our bags didn't leave Chicago.  As I type this (7/21: 5:30pm HK time), we are waiting for a claim that was made to include our bags on the next flight to HK.  Hopefully we will get our luggage tonight or tomorrow night.  The problem is that we are without clothes and some toiletries, and some of our supplies and decorations are in those bags. Luckily, I was paranoid before I went on this trip and I took all of my VBS stuff from the leader pack in my personal carry-on bag.  Only one classroom I think doesn't have the leader-pack related items with them, so that's a good thing!  But pray that we get those bags back soon.


Day 2:

Today, we have set up our rooms, talked to our co-teachers about VBS this week, and then wraped-up some last minute details.  I have a co-teacher from the church in my room (her name is Winnie) and a teacher's assistant.  I looked at our class roster and it looks like I'll be having 18 kids in my room.  That was actually a lot less than I thought, so we're pretty good! It makes it great for working in groups too because we can divide it evenly between us three teachers.  All of the volunteers are very eager to help in any way they can and they are really excited about this upcoming week.  We have about 120-125 kids registered, so we broke the record from last year.  Thomas told us that he didn't even advertise it as much this year.  It's just nuts.  It's great though because we learned a lot of them aren't involved in a church anywhere and several have never heard the Gospel at all.  I think it's starting to hit us how big this is going to be, but really we just won't have any idea until Monday rolls around, so we'll just wait and see.

Things to pray for:

-Our luggage to come hopefully tonight or tomorrow (we bought some clothes and items today, but we would still like it to come!)
-Kids coming to VBS
-Volunteers
-Jet Lag
-Weather

Thanks, and I will talk to you later!

-Scott