Well, I have had many great adventures since my last posting. I have been to the aquarium, to a fado house, and now I am off to Porto. The aquarium was pretty awesome, although, it is quite a bit smaller then the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The aquarium was arranged by the different oceans and, kind of like Ikea, there were arrows on the ground and a certain pathway you are supposed to take. The aquarium was super dark also, so I barely got any pictures. For some reason they don’t allow you to use the flash...I don’t think they understand that if we can’t use flash then we need more light. However, I was able to find Nemo and Dori! I also got a some cool pictures of them both. One cool thing about the aquarium is that many of the tanks have tons of different fish in them. So they had a huge tropical reef tank with puffer fish and tons of other bright colored beautiful fish.
We also had a youth event last weekend and we took the youth to Ikea for breakfast. We had four youth this time but it allowed us to have some really good conversations. The oldest Fairbanks’ daughter, Hannah, will be graduating from high school this Spring and is now having to go through the very challenging job of picking a university or atleast figure out what she wants to do. She is currently wanting to do a discipleship program with YWAM in New Zealand but is also contemplating what college she wants to go to. She has the option of choosing to either go to a university in Canada or Europe because she has dual Canadian and Portuguese citizenship. Dan, the main youth guy, and I had an awesome talk with her about seeking God’s guidance. I think we helped her in one sense but she still has a very hard decision ahead of her. After the conversation we then took a tour of Ikea, in which everybody had to test run every bed, faucet, and toilet.
A couple days ago, I had a girls outing with two girls that I use to live with when I was at PBI, Jordan and Regina. We went into one of the larger fado areas and found an awesome fado house! This place had the exact atmosphere that I had pictured for a fado house. It was dark inside with the only light coming from candles. The food was delicious and the company even greater. After we started eating the fado singers started performing and it started with a young woman, who was probably around my age, and she had an amazing voice. The second performer was an older woman, probably in her 40s, and she also sang beautifully. She sang a song when translated says something like, “If you concentrate on your love to much you will forget about God. I did not forget about God.” I really liked the message this line was portraying because I think many times we can focus so much on finding love or the love that we have found that we forget about the most important thing to life. The third singer was a 70 year old man, who was also our waiter, He had black rimmed rectangular glasses and always had a shot of some sort of dark alcohol with him when he sang. These three singers would sing 3 songs and then they would switch. Once a full rotation happened they would take about a 15 minute break and then they would start again. They did the rotation about 3 times before we had to leave to catch the metro and a bus back home. The night was super perfect and was everything I dreamed of! The great thing about fado is that so much emotion is portrayed through the singing and instruments that it doesn’t really matter if you can understand them or not. I definitely believe that I need another dose of fado before I head back to the states and I for sure think that I need to see Manuel again, the 70 year old fado singer.
Currently I am on a train heading to Porto. I bought my ticket ahead of time and was quite relaxed once I got to the train station this morning. Unfortunately, I can’t do anything without a slight failure involved....so.....I might have accidently bought my train ticket for the wrong day.....fortunately for me the guys working on the train were super phenomanazing and called the main office or something and got my ticket changed so that I could head to Porto today. So, here I am, riding on a train through the country side of Portugal and it is amazingly beautiful.
Well that is it for now!
Peace Out!
No comments:
Post a Comment