Dirty Laundry

Today was definitely not one of my favorite days here. I woke up to shower before church to find my travel shampoo and conditioner had exploded in my small toiletries bag. It was such a mess to clean up, and I spent the time I was going to use taking a shower cleaning my stuff. I made it to church on time, though I wasn't smelling my best. I was kind of anxious to see what a Thai church service was like. Most of it seemed about like home, overlooking the minor fact that it was in another language. I tried to keep up as best I could, attempting to remember their cultural eccentricities simultaneously: I kept my Bible off the floor, my feet were flat on the ground, and my head was bowed low whenever respect was due. Dr. Henderson gave teh sermon today, and it was really cool seeing him speak so excitedly in Thai. He defintiely kept the translator entertained because I kept hearing her leaugh in my headphones. However, halfway through the sermon my head phone jack went out, and I wasn't able to understand the rest of the service. I was pretty disappointed about that. After church, we all met downstairs to eat the lunch the church had prepared. Part of it was cashew chicken, and the other part of it was something I thought was sausage. It ended up being filled with some kind of mystery substance though, which was less than appetizing. I have tried to be pretty open-minded about the food here, but some things you just don't want to have a second bite of. After lunch, I was surprised to find out that they had the afternoon filled with their weekly activities. Terri and I thought we would opt out of the first part of them to do some laundry. However, that ended up being mroe of a daunting task than we had expected. The dryer was broken so all of our wet clothes had to air dry, and the washer was on its last leg-there was something wrong with the water connection. So we had to fill up buckets at a valve on the roof, which was three floors up, and carry the water back down to fill up the washer tub. It wouldn't have been so bad, but each lod had three rinse cycles for some reason, and it took about three trips up and down the stairs to fill up the tub for each rinse. I am sure you can do the math :). Terri and I probably had enough laundry for about four loads of clothes, but we ended up stuffing our clothes in the washer and minimizing it to two. Our clothes came out looking not too different than they did going in. On the room, our clothes dried in some pretty foul spelling air. All in all, I am really not sure that any of our work today did any good. We did manage to waste our entire afternoon and miss all of the church activities. We managed to make it for church though, and I am glad we did. A missionary from Alabama gave the sermon on Luke 6. His southern preaching enthusiasm defintiley lifted my spirits. After church, we ate the dinner the church has prepared. Then Terri and I came back to our room. We folded our laundry and attempted to repack our suitcases. I opened my first bag and found my big shampoo exploded all over my big bag. I definitley was not happy about that, and I spent a good chunk of the evening fixing that fiasco. After that, I spent some time just recovering from my day's frustrations, but they were not over quite yet. When I got on my computer to check on my blog, I found out that my four newest posts weren't showing up on my site. I am keeping my fingers crossed on this one too. I definitley was infuriated at this point, so Terri and I decided to go out for a quick but much needed treat-ice cream. When we got back, I was more than ready for bed. I just wanted to go to sleep and attempt to forget this not-so-great day. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. I really would like to get to Chiang Mai with a good attitude.