road trip numero dos

dearest family and friends,

first, pictures to come later; sorry! i am at a house without wifi which means i can't get my pictures onto this blog without significant difficulty. soon they will arrive! 
secondly, my apologies for the late arrival of my next blog. it is difficult to find an hour with the computer when you are in a new city every day, and sometimes more than one city!

this blog is to fill you all in on the second raod trip i was a part of this past wednesday and thursday. after meeting up with david last tuesday, we spent the day with jonas and a.c and then headed out on wednesday with 3 goals:
- 1) to see more of europe!
- 2) to reconnect with david
- 3) to let jo and a.c get ready for their wedding as it was only 2 days away!

we drove to the memorial at the site of the former buchenwald concentration camp. this was a sombering trip, but also a really good experience. many of the buildings in the camp were no longer standing, but the foundations were still visible to give the visitors a good idea of what the camp would have looked like during WWII. buchenwald was one of the biggest concentration camps (it was a work camp, not an extermination camp) and held over 240 000 inmates during its existence. at the time of its liberation, buchenwald held 110 000 people, if i remember correctly. the whole place was ... well, depressing, but really good - i have read so many books about the holocaust and the camps, but seeing one of these camps with my own eyes still was shocking - how humans can express this sort of brutality against other humans is atrocious. my prayers that day were that God would continuously be teaching the human race love, grace, mercy, and a desire to follow Him. how blessed i am to live in a peaceful country!
i have many more thoughts and things to say about our experience at buchenwald, but not everyone will want to read them, so please feel free to email me or talk to me when you see me if you would like to hear more about the camp.

david, brady, and i slept at a hostel that night (my first hostel!), and headed out in the morning to the town of erfurt, germany. that morning we saw st mary's cathedral and had a tour of the cathedral by the lovely, british tour guide georgia! she was enthusiastic and genuine and everything anyone could want in a tour guide! we enjoyed having her as our tour guide - she was so loving and wonderful the whole time! 

after lunch, we went to wartburg, which is the castle where martin luther translated the new testament! so cool! just like much of our european experience, the tour was really expensive and we couldn't go inside the main living area of the castle without a tour, so we satisified ourselves by exploring every other possible nook and cranny of the place. we had a great time! it was also very neat to see a place that is so important to our faith. just thinking about luther walking around the very place we were was an incredibly neat thought. yay for ancestors of faith! 

then we headed into eisenach (wartburg sits on the outskirts of eisenach) and saw the house where johann sebastian bach was born! (or so they think..... kind of takes away the charm when there is a sign directly outside the house that says "we are not entirely sure if this is the exact house where bach was born." but it was still exciting!!) that was a nerdy moment and highlight for me, because i love music and i have studied bach's music as a piano and theory student! very cool! we also saw the house where luther lived while he was a student. also very cool! 

a delicious pizza supper ensued. we ate at an italian restaurant in germany run by greeks with canadian guests. what a multicultural supper! fun times. the evening was beautiful, with the sun coming down on us at a not-too-hot-and-not-too-cold type of temperature, the food was good, and company even better. what a lovely evening that was :) 

after that we made it safely back to jonas' parents' house (where we stayed)! next up: blog about my first german wedding! SO MUCH FUN. 

soon, 
tejal :) 

pictures from berlin

heyo! the promised pictures from last post. if you haven't read it yet, do so, and these pictures will make sense! enjoy! :) 

- tejal

the soccer game! approximately 54 378 people. so awesome!!

a lot of the berlin fans (aka most berlin fans!) wore jerseys and scarves
 to the game in support of their team.

singing the german national anthem

the holocaust memorial. there are 2 711  concrete blocks like these in this place
to remember the murdered jews of europe.

the berliner dom!  

the sanctuary of the berliner dom (side view). astounding! 

a remaining piece of the berlin wall.

the soviet memorial

on sundays in mauer park, there is free karaoke for anyone who wants to come.
there must have been 500 people there that day.

beautiful berlin from above!

berliners for a weekend

(note! pictures to come very soon! tomorrow, i hope.)

helloooo!

family and friends, what a weekend it was. so good, so blessed, so awesome.

this past weekend brady and i were blessed to spend time with ben and melissa, a missionary couple in berlin with mbmission. neither brady nor i had ever met ben or melissa (our connection was through jonas, as he is close friends with ben), but they were generous with their time, resources, and love. they welcomed us into their lovely home in the former west berlin, and took us to various sights around the city and also gave us directions to places we wanted to see if they were unable to make.

honestly, one of the nicest parts of the weekend was the ability to stay more than one night in one place (something we hadn't done since arriving in europe). arriving on friday and leaving on monday, the consistency of a home was comforting; eating supper with others as a sort of family was also well appreciated.

ALSO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! major highlight. i experienced my first european soccer game!!!!!!!!!!! AMAZING. seriously SO exciting! it was crazy. berlin played frankfurt (final score: 6-1) and it was the loudest, most hyped up and most awesome event i've been to, hands down. there were also approximately 54 378 people there, so that was pretty sweet too. thoroughly enjoyed that. if you are ever in europe, go to a soccer game. SO worth it. a totally new and awesome cultural experience. :) this girl is happy for sure. another check off the bucket list! :)

over the weekend we did so many new and interesting things, but blogging about this would take me until next year, so i'll give you a list of our stops (sorry for the lack of pictures!) and add some of my thoughts and feelings at the end.

some of the places we visited/saw:
- holocaust memorial (also known as the "memorial to the murdered jews of europe")
- berlin wall, accompanied by "topography of terror", which is an informational exhibit/small museum that describes in great detail the rise to power of the nazis and what life during their reign was like
- checkpoint charlie
- berliner dom
- the site of hitler's bunker
- former luftwaffe headquarters
- alexander platz (a square in berlin that has a lot going on - fun to go see and be a part of! nothing of particular historical significance that i was informed of)
- mauer park (there was a flea market there as well as some karaoke going on - at least 300 people were there for the karaoke, watching and singing!!)
- ben and melissa's church
- soviet memorial (a memorial for the soldiers who died in the battle of berlin in april/may 1945)

that list is only part of what we saw, most likely! there were so many new sights and sounds to take in during our too-short stay in berlin. all of it was really awesome! a definite highlight of mine thus far for sure.

one of the best experiences for me this past weekend was the berliner dom. if you follow the link, you will see that the dom is an enormous and extravagant cathedral on berlin's museum island. the inside was SO beautiful, decorated to the highest degree, and felt almost cavernous as the sanctuary was so, so big. i was actually breathless as i stared up at the ceiling of the sanctuary and reflected on how little this splendour didn't even come close to mirroring the glory of God. i also thought about how humble my church seems compared to this, and whether that was good or bad. i actually haven't come to any solid conclusion on that thought (or question, i suppose) - so please feel free to email me your thoughts if you would like to discuss this! i would love to hear from you.

another highlight for me, as somber as it was, was realizing that nazis and even hitler himself walked the very streets i was walking. i have been interested in  the holocaust for as long as i can remember, and it was really amazing to see some part of those years in real life. berlin was a very important centre for the nazis and so many decisions were made there that changed forever the course of history. it makes me grateful for the freedom in which i live and the comforts i enjoy - i honestly cannot even IMAGINE living in a time when persecution is to the absolute extreme like it was during WWII. there is much to think about there, and i certainly hope that as people remember that horrific time, we will learn from our mistakes and do our best as a human population to stop those kinds of atrocities from happening again. i know that the world isn't perfect and that racial wars/oppression/etc happen, but i do hope that humanity will learn from its mistakes.

enough of being depressing. the last highlight was DEFINITELY staying with ben and melissa. i know i said this in brief already, but their open home and open arms were so needed at that time. they were wonderful and loving, and i have 2 new friends now and know 2 of my brothers and sisters in Christ better. fellowship is awesome!

what a solid weekend. yesterday we arrived in bielefeld and have joined forces with david, another trek friend! today we headed out to buchenwald, one of the concentration camps in WWII, but i will blog about that when we are back in bielefeld.

lots of love,
tejal :)

SwAG (Switzerland, Austria, and Germany)

[WARNING: this post is long. i hope you will stick with me til the end though! it's been a neat couple of days.]

hello from germany!

it's crazy how small europe is... well, compared to canada, at least. over the last 2 days, brady, jonas and i went on a "small" road trip through 3 countries. it is kind of astounding that that is even possible. 

yesterday we left around noon to head out to our first stop, switzerland! after driving through a very scenic 2 hours of countryside and a swiss border crossing, we made it to rheinfalls, which is on the outskirts of schaffhausen, switzerland. rheinfalls is a gorgeous, teal-blue waterfall that has become a huge tourist attraction, naturally. the weather was super hot and it definitely would have been nice to jump in to those waterfalls (funny, me saying that!). we walked around the entire waterfall and over it via a bridge that people are trying to turn into a replica of lover's bridge in paris. the views were breathtaking and it was amazing to see another part of God's creation that was so beautiful.

rheinfalls!

from another angle

from there, we drove a short distance to a grocery store - and CHEESE IS SO CHEAP! i am jealous. i would like to live here. i think there was a block of brie cheese on for 4$ that would normally cost 8-10$ in canada. 
okay sorry, aside over. 
we picked up some groceries and then drove to stein am rhein, another small and unbelievably fairy-tale-ish town right on the border of switzerland. looking over the rhein river, jonas, brady and i ate our simple but tasty picnic and thoroughly enjoyed the sights. kids jumped off the 5- or 7-meter-high bridge and boats drove by while we ate and talked about how this town was so unlike any other we'd seen before. definitely a favourite moment thus far for me.  it was so peaceful and beautiful there - i really enjoyed that!

the river we gazed at during our picnic

after our picnic, we walked around stein am rhein and took a good number of pictures. one building was built in 1423, if i remember correctly; another, 1448.  europe certainly has a richness in its history that canada unfortunately cannot share. can you imagine life back then? i tried, which was interesting! i'm not often inspired to think of the "old days" when i'm at home, as there isn't anything 500+ years old to remind me of days gone by. here, though, it was much easier, because you can so easily picture horse-drawn carriages rolling down the street while women throw wash-buckets of water out the widows and kids run around barefoot as soon as you close your eyes! wow. also reflecting on how God saw ALL of that AND remembers it. that's astounding. that's a lot of love for His creation. i can barely remember last week, it seems, yet He knows every man, woman, and child from every moment of history. we serve a great God. 

what a beautiful town!

part of our trek team, reunited!

then it was off to bregenz, austria! 3rd country of the day and we'd only been gone for 6 hours at this time!! we spent a lovely evening there walking around and talking, seeing the sights. we also tried an austrian and german specialty, currywurst! this dish is a sausage with curry powder in a sweet-and-sour sauce, kind of. it's served with a bun and i really enjoyed it!

austria!

then we stayed at the cutest little hotel (more like an amped-up bed&breakfast, but still awesome) for the night. it was right in the mountains in germany and the scenery was amazing!

our bed and breakfast :)

this morning we headed off to a few more places - a castle, neuschwanstein, and a town, rothenberg ob der tauber! super neat, both of them. 

neuschwanstein was the vacation home of king ludwig II - imagine having a literal CASTLE as your vacation home!! wow. it was huge and really very impressive. apparently the castle didn't get finished before his death but is very extravagant. we didn't go inside (not cheap!) but we did take pictures outside for a while and enjoyed the german mountains in the background. there was even a couple having their wedding pictures taken there! 

i'd like this as a summer home; what about you?

i was probably a bit more excited about seeing rothenberg ob der tauber for one simple - but very classic - reason: parts of harry potter and the deathly hallows (I & II) were filmed there!!! and you could tell that, too, right away. the town was very old and also very story-book-like. i could immediately envision scenes from harry potter being filmed there, maybe hogsmeade. i wasn't actually able to pick out a specific spot that i thought was in the movies, but it definitely was no stretch of the imagination to see why the movie team chose that spot. the town was quaint and very - if i may be so stereotypical - european. cobblestone streets, buildings wedged together, narrow alleys, small stores with their doors open, and a wall with walkway running around the entire outside of the old part of town. super cool! i also managed to pick up my first pair of birkenstocks there :) i am a happy camper!

rothenberg ob der tauber

me with my new birkenstocks! a check off the bucket list :)

so, it has been a busy 2 days, but a great 2 days. what a blessing to see all these new sights with such good friends! i have enjoyed having an "inside look", sort of, at the places we've seen, since jonas is german and knows these places in a different way than a tour guide would show us. and it's more fun this way!

tomorrow we are off to berlin! as always, prayers for safety and wisdom are appreciated.

soon, 
tejal :)

europe 2013!

HELLO FRIENDS!

wow it has been quite a while since i last blogged. this is certainly the occasion to re-start, though, if there ever was one. 

I AM IN EUROPE. for those of you who don't know, i'm here because my good friend jonas and his lovely fiancé a.c. (short for ann-christine) are getting married in only 11 days! brady and i are here to celebrate with them, see some of europe, and reconnect with some good friends. david, from the other trek team, will also join us in a week! this will be a great time. i am so excited!

so far this has been insane. so busy and so little sleep and so much soreness. 

on monday, august 5, i got up at 6 sleepily showered and ate, and made it to the airport for just after 7 with brady at my side. after saying goodbyes to my family (including my wonderful french-exchange sister), we made it through security and boarded our plane in good time, and, 3 hours later, made it to montréal safely. then we had some not-so-lovely adventures with rental cars, traffic, and a new city, finally making it to see my oh-so-lovely sister (who is in montréal for that student french exchange program i mentioned earlier, by the way) whom i have not seen in over a month! so it was FABULOUS to see her, and to see some of montréal, which is a place i hadn't been before, for the record. we walked and métro-ed and talked and ate - it was a lot of fun! such a blessing to be able to see her there - and so awesome in general to see her again! :)

this girl is good lookin! i have missed her. <3

after returning the car to the rental place, we made our way back to the airport to catch our flight to paris! we happily enjoyed some well-priced airport pizza (which was delicious!) and then boarded! 6 hours later, which were filled with too much sweating, plane air, and definitely not enough sleeping, we made it through customs into this continent that is so new to me! bonjour paris! 

my french certainly came in handy as we figured out the parisian métro, the luggage storage facilities, the euro change-maker, many street signs, and speaking with numerous french people! (french is a beautiful language, by the way. i love hearing people speak french - and so 2 french cities in one "day" was amazing! we also had lunch at a cute little indian restaurant in an alley called "passage brady". we laughed about that for a bit. (which was our sleep deprivation talking, by the way)

the little indian restaurant!

we then walked to cathédrale notre dame, which felt too far away for my sore and blistered feet, but was a cool experience nonetheless. i was a little zombie-ish (read: a LOT zombie-ish) all day though, which was too bad, but such is life when you are sleep-deprived. VERY sleep-deprived.

notre dame! (both pictures)

then, to our surprise, the train we were to catch to stuttgart, germany, was 15 minutes early without notification, so we barely made the train with only 2 minutes to spare after a little bit of panic and a bunch of running through the train station with a good number of crazy looks sent our way. 

the next 4 hours took us from france to germany (CRAZY!) and i slept through most of it (which was a huge blessing!). jonas and a.c picked us up from the train station, took us out for food (my first donair!) and then back to a.c's apartment, which is where we are now. it was so awesome to reconnect with jo and meet a.c - it feels like only 2 weeks ago i said goodbye to jo on the last day of trek instead of the year-and-a-bit it has actually been. what a blessing real friends are. jo and a.c have been so generous and kind with their resources and have been so hospitable. 

we are safe, showered and fed. life is good. we are blessed. i am pumped to see what all the next weeks hold. God is so good!

soon,
tejal :)

re-entering

hello my friends :)

well it has been SO, SO long since i last blogged. so long. if any of you are reading this, i'm sorry for not writing a "wrap - up blog post" about trek. it didn't seem fitting, because although trek is over, my journey with the Lord certainly isn't, and so maybe this blog doesn't need to be either. check in every once in a while; maybe i'll have written something.

since trek, life has been good, but also challenging. but that's not a bad thing. i returned to my family on june 16, and since then everything has been crazy. my life looks pretty different now than it did before i left, but the changes that have happened have been good, and i am confident that God has been moving in my life.

i'm at school now, studying in the faculty of education. university, as everyone warned me, is tough, but worth it. my classes are interesting and i am blessed to be going to school with old friends and also making new friends. i'm taking a full course load, so life is filled with homework and i often feel that i am being eaten by the amount of work i have to do, but it's been so worth it!

i'm back to working with the junior youth group in my church, another huge blessing. God is showing me how much these kids needs older people to look up to and ask questions of and trust - and how i, too, need someone to look up to, ask questions of, trust. mentoring is so key.
my Bible study group has resumed as well, which is another fantastic blessings :) the 6 of us are crazy, wild, Jesus-loving girls and we have a good time! we're studying the book "what is the gospel?" by greg gilbert right now - i recommend it to all of you!

i've been blessed with the chance to visit some friends from trek and have some friends visit me - we have had some good times! what solid people, all of them. i definitely miss them but am deeply blessed by the friendships we share and are able to maintain. God is good to us :)

brady, charis, and myself enjoying a beautiful evening in saskatoon!

well, there's a short update! my apologies for the short post, but in some senses, life is quieter now than in the philippines... in other ways, not so much, but i'm sure you don't want me ranting about math homework on my blog.

love,
tejal

ps sorry for the lack of pictures! without teammates with cameras that have pictures to steal... well, my posts will look more like this.

goodbyes and hellos

hello all!


so it has been a crazy, crazy period of time since i last blogged. time has been full and full of a lot of good things, as well as some very new experiences!


2 weekends ago, may 26-27, we were scheduled to have our evangelical concerts. unfortunately, on the morning of the 26th (more like the middle of the night), charis got sick and ended up being sick enough that she couldn't go to the concert on the 26th. i volunteered to stay home with her, as she was definitely too sick to stay home alone. when the rest of the team got home from concert #1, we decided to take charis in to the emergency room because she was most definitely NOT getting better. in the end, charis was admitted to a small clinic in town, staying there for 2 nights and nearly 2 days. i also stayed with her for the whole time, because all i knew was that if it was me who was seriously ill, i wouldn't want to be stranded in a foreign hospital on my own. they were also probably 40 of the most boring hours of my entire life, but they were worth it because it meant charis wasn't alone. we did get out, and she is feeling much better now. please pray for her full healing, as she isn't feeling 100% quite yet. praise God that she is definitely on the road to healing though!

the concert still went on even without charis and i.
it was a big success! praise God :)

a few days after the hospital experience, on wednesday, may 31st, the arcanos, along with the balacbac church, threw my team a very large, wonderful, good-bye party. we heard some songs they had prepared for us, a few speeches, and they showered us with so, so many gifts! it was actually really incredible to see how much work they had put into this, and how they had pooled all their resources to give gifts to us, even though we have known them for such a short time. it's kind of like if you or i met someone, and then, as they were leaving 3 months later, we pooled to buy them a top-of-the-line laptop, or something of that value. crying definitely happened at this party as well, and then a couple hours of being able to hang out with them for the last time. we definitely were blessed by the party and the people, and i know i will miss these newfound friends very much!

somehow smiles were all around, even at a goodbye party
(apologies for the bad quality picture!!)

the arcano family, my filipino family. i'm going to miss them! 

we drove down to manila the day after the party to spend about 36 hours there before we flew out of the philippines on saturday morning. we spent some time touring the city, which was really neat, but also very hot! temperatures reached mid-thirties (celsius) for sure, plus humidity on top of that. on friday, our full day in manila, we were able to visit heart again (pastor sam's granddaughter who came to visit us about a month ago), which was a huge blessing! we spend the day first swimming with her at her condo complex, then taking her out for lunch, and finally buying her a new pair of dressy flip flops (we broke her old ones by accident!) before taking her home. it was sad to say goodbye to her, especially because we knew it was going to be harder on her than on us, but we all are hoping to see her again someday!

fun in the sun :)

we flew safely home on june 2nd, and are now officially in debrief. it was wonderful to see our friends on the ukraine team again, and the past few days have been very full of stories, laughter, and fun. debrief is more relaxed than training, schedule-wise, in the way that most of the activities in which we participate are more "fun stuff", instead of sessions. so far we've been able to go bowling, go to a small amusement park, have a bonfire supper, and go to see a waterfall called "bridal falls". all these activites have been very fun, and a great opportunity to relax as we adjust back into north american lifestyle. above all, they have provided me with excellent opportunities to reconnect with my friends who were in ukraine! please pray for all 9 of us here (bryan is still in paris and will be long past the end of debrief, so we won't see him again) as we experience these next 10 days, that we would learn to trust God fully with our past experiences and the future that lies ahead. please pray that we would engage fully in these last couple weeks of trek in order to have closure for the past and hope for the future as we walk out into whatever God has planned for us next.

a last look at my second home

bridal falls! so beautiful :)

sometimes i take pictures of the scenery.
sorry about how dark the photo is! 

being outdoors is a gift from God.

having some good conversations with one of the interns, jacob

more to come later, as always!


love to all,
tejal :)