Here we are at the end of another week. I was expecting to be Internet-less for the weekend while we changed over providers, and our 2 students were bemoaning lost contact with their loved ones in Germany and China. Whilst we were told next Wednesday as the expected date, lo and behold we were reconnected in under 3 days. O how we rely on modern technology; you might just as well have cut off my right leg.So was it worth the changeover? It's half the price of Bigpond and 10 times the speed. We have gone from 512/128 download/upload speed to a staggering 5000/1000 with a total of 25gigabytes download in a month. If that doesn't make sense to those of you who aren't IT nerds, that's a lot of very fast downloads. I can see why Telstra shares are going down, everyone is exiting like there's no tomorrow, and they can't match the zillion providers that are popping up everywhere.
I also thought I might post up our plans for Christmas this year....by choice we have elected to spend our very first Christmas in 29 years childless. It almost happened in 2005, but Cheyne saved the day. We have booked to go to China, leaving on the 12th December late in the evening, and returning to Australia after 4 nights in Singapore on the 10th January. We are travelling with our Chinese friends Sam and Selina to their home city (Chengdu) in Sichuan province, which is in the south-west of China. We plan to take several flights from Chengdu, one to Shanghai, the other to an ancient city of minority people. We will stay with Selina's parents in Chengdu for quite a bit of our time. We feel blessed to be able to make this trip. I have always had a passion to visit China, and we felt that God brought Sam and Selina into our lives as our adopted children for a reason. We feel that the plan is still unfolding, and we are most excited to see what evolves. On Sunday at church I met a South Korean couple who are doing mission work in China an hour's flight south of Chengdu....we are not always sure why God places people before us, but we continue to step out in faith that God is in control and that we continue to be faithful servants.Whilst we are sad that we will not be with family and friends this Christmas, we will be close to experiencing a white Christmas in a very chilly part of China.