This picture was taken in the Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam. I had the chance to stop over there on my last trip to Thailand with Royal Brunei Air. On the way to Bangkok I just hung around in the airport and tried to catch up on some sleep. Probably the safest airport in the world to sleep in that I've been too. Its like the chairs are designed for people wanting to sleep in between flights, they get alot of transit passengers there.
On the way back from Bangkok I had a day and a half in Brunei, I decided to skip the organized tours as I didn't really want to spend much money and just cruised around myself... Most of my time there consisted of eating. the cuisine is very much similar to what you find throughout Malaysia, ate a couple meals of Roti, made me miss being in Penang.
Brunei is not a really big place, but the people are extremely friendly. They will go out of your way to help you and everywhere I went people wanted to chat, some people said if I came again that I could just stay with them.
At the airport in Brunei before coming home I had a few hours to kill again so I was sitting down listening to my iRiver and a few people came and sat down... two of the ladies were Thai who had lived in Brunei for several years, because their husbands work there. I had only been out of Thailand for a couple days, but it was great to speak Thai again. After a while of chatting it turned out that one of the ladies is from Korat, the place that Tuu comes from, and the second lady was from Kantharalak in Sii Sa Ket which happened to be the place way out in the middle of Isaan where Shane had done outreach. It was all a bit of a spinout.
July 15, 2006
July 10, 2006
... for just a moment
It was only a short trip to Thailand this time, but 2 weeks was still a huge blessing for many reasons.
I got to see my brother graduate from his DTS in ChiangRai.
I got to eat some of the foods I've been craving for the past few months.
... and I got to spend time with my beautiful girl friend. I haven't talked much about her on my blog before, so for those that I haven't had the chance to talk to here are some more details.
Her Thai nickname is Tuu, most foreigners call her Tuli, and normally I just call her "honey" ;) all of those are easier for me to pronounce than her full name (Rungtiwa Noonpolkrang). She turned 24 on June 28th. She's from Korat, Thailand. She studied the last DTS which I was a staff on, and we were on the same outreach where we had a good opportunity to get to know each other, the thing that seemed to draw us together was our love for photography. However it still wasn't until "after DTS" that God led us together. Little did either of us know that we'd been praying to God about each other during the DTS, but didn't want a relationship to take away from what God was doing in our lives, so both of us had committed it to God and didn't actually think anything would come of it, but God had other ideas. It was so good, it was like we were both staring at God and asking what he wanted for us, looking to Him, and then we kind of bumped into each other... just love the way God works.
Its been 5 months now since we had the "chat"... and once again I was glad I didnt have to try to make anything happen, God just led our conversation ... and I just bumbled my way through ;)
Of the 5 months we've only been together in the same place for less than 3 weeks, but thats cool.
Wasn't sure what a long distance relationship would be like, but I can honestly say the 5 months have been awesome, rewarding, and callenging ... and it makes the time spent together even that much greater... goodbyes are the worst, but thats fine because there will always be another new "Hello" around the corner. Don't always know how long those corners are ... but we're just keeping on eyes on God and before we know it we'll bump each into each other again.
Praying that one day there won't be so many goodbyes...
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