Fun Events in January!

So we had been here 6 months almost when we realized we had never really done anything "touristy" in our city. We just moved in and started living life here but haven't really seen the sites. So for New Year's we decided to go and do something a tourist would do and we had lots of fun! Here are some pictures:

Near our home there is this river and you can go catch a boat and go for a ride to many places. One of those would be to the Elephant Camp. That is where we decide to go that day.

This is the first site we saw as we pulled up on the river at the Elephant Camp.

Davis and David got on their elephant first. It was really high up. We had to climb in this tree house looking thing to get on.

We saw some beautiful scenery along the way and how the people really use the land well.

We also got to see how some hilltribe people live and work. We were able to watch some ladies weaving by hand to make many items and they sold them there. They are so beautiful.

We also enjoyed seeing that instead of having a dog leashed in their yard, they had their pig chained up to a tree in their yard. The pigs seemed to enjoy it.

We were trailing David and Davis!

As we rode there was a lady up in a tree house that was selling food for the elephants. So our elephant driver stopped and we bought a bag of food. Then when we started going again, the driver asked Samantha if she wanted to feed it. She said yes. So he switched places with her and he sat by me and she sat on the elephant like she was driving him while she fed him food. This is a picture of her feeding him! It was a lot of fun!

Just in case you were wondering, we made it back safe and sound!

One of the things Davis loves about Thailand is that you can set off fireworks pretty much anywhere and you can buy them really cheap. He got some for Christmas so he saved them and we shot them off on New Year's Eve!

We were actually pretty impressed with how good they turned out! We took some friends with us and had a great celebration!

In December each year in our city they have a flower festival. This year we were able to attend and we loved it! It was beautiful. I can't show all the pictures we took but thought I would show a few. There was a parade and each of these floats were completely made from flowers, yes the elephants too! I am putting a couple more of the float pictures below just so you can see the creativity.

Samantha has been learning Thai dance here and this is one of her Thai dance moves, notice the hands.

I never cease to be amazed by the creativity of the Thai people. They are amazingly creative in so many ways. We want them to know the God who has made them so creative. This is a watermelon that is carved to look like flowers.

It was like walking in a flower wonderland. Everywhere you turned there was amazing beauty, we were surrounded by it.

These are our two cool men!

There is never a dull moment with these two around. Thai people love to take picture so people were taking pictures everywhere here at the Festival. There was a young boy and his dad right beside us that took a picture posing just like David and Davis are in this picture. We saw it and David said, "Davis let's take a picture like them!" So they did. Of course the Thai son that was with his dad was about 5. We laughed so hard everyone was looking at us. Thai people are typically rather quiet. We haven't taken on that trait yet.

And this was a really cool tunnel completely made of beautiful flowers!

Christmas in Thailand 2011

The Christmas season began with us trying to find a Christmas tree in a country that doesn't celebrate Christmas. Fortunately there are enough farangs living here now that they do have a little bit but not much. One store had a few Christmas trees so we went to shop for one (artificial of course). As we stood there looking at the Christmas tree I looked at the short aisle next to it. There was maybe a 4 foot aisle of one side of what they would call Christmas decorations. Many of them were purple, pink, blue, yellow and more "fun" colors but certainly not Christmas colors. And of course, nothing with Jesus or the true Christmas story. It made us kind of sad to really realize there is a whole country here that does not know the amazing truth of Christmas! So we quickly decided we would have to get creative and make all of our Christmas tree decorations. The kids and David are extremely creative and they began to work on getting supplies to make things. We took that weekend to make all kinds of decorations for our tree and to decorate it. We were so proud of our kids as they took a really hard situation and made the most out of it!

Here they are hard at work making decorations! It was actually a lot of fun!

Samantha and Davis each decorated a small tree for each of their rooms

Mark saw how hard it was for the kids, especially Samantha, in the store when she realized we wouldn't have any of our own special ornaments to hang up that we had used every year. So he jumped in as well helping make snowflakes for the tree.

Then it was time to decorate and everyone helped. Yes, even the balls you see hanging on the tree were handmade by us.

And Samantha finished the tree with putting the star on top.

Our tree was beautiful when we finished and we had it in the sliding glass doors on the front of our house so that everyone who came by could see it. When people see the tree they know you must be Christian. I think it was good to experience Christmas in another country and without our regular things and even without family to really remind us the truth of what Christmas really is about. However Christmas is also about getting together and sharing that truth, which we also did and had much fun.

Triatholon fun!

December brought with it a Triatholon sponsored by our children's school. This was to raise money for a basketball court to be built at their new school. So our family got very excited about this and we all did what we are best at in the triatholon. Samantha and Davis ran, David biked and I volunteered to cheer people on and give out water. With this triatholon you could choose to do all 3 (swimming, biking and running) or you could choose to do one or two of them. Here are some pictures.

As you can tell Samantha, Davis and Mark look pretty fresh right now so this is before they ran.

Here they go. Don't they look professional starting out on their run. This is at their new school but they will run a 5K and it involves some hills because we do live in the mountains.

While the kids were out running, David came in from his biking which he had started earlier. He's headed into the finish line.

Here comes Davis a few feet from the finish line!

Our friend Mark, who stayed with us a few weeks decided he would be a part of the fun as well. He did great running and here he is a few feet from the finish line.

And Samantha is running those last few feet to the finish line. Now she looks serious about this. She did great as well! As a matter of fact the Lynn's were represented well. Davis and Samantha won first place in each of their divisions, David won first place in his division for biking and Mark placed as well in his division of running. It was a great day and a lot of fun!

Christmas Eve

We have always celebrated Christmas Eve with all of my family. It is a tradition that Davis did not want to let go of. So he said we have to celebrate with others on Christmas Eve. So we thought and prayed and felt like God wanted us to celebrate with some of those who have become near and dear to us here. So we invited them all over for Christmas Eve dinner and games and we had a blast!

We invited students from mine and David's school.

We also invited our dear Thai friends whom we love

And some more friends!

Some of us were even eating outside on our patio because we had so many. We had about 25 all together, people of 4 different nationalities and most of them do not know Jesus. It was a great opportunity to let them know why we celebrate Christmas!

The kids loved having all these young people over and they enjoyed all the Thai food as well.

We all talked, laughed, played games and just had a great evening!

Here is part of the group before they left. It's amazing how quickly God can knit your heart with others. We want all these to come to know the love and hope of Jesus.

Christmas Day

We began our Christmas morning as we do every year, reading the Christmas story in our room. This year we also spent some time just praying and thanking God and worshipping Him through song. We sang many Christmas songs about Jesus. We really missed those this year since you don't hear any in Thailand. Actually we were in a restaurant one night and we did her one, we all sang along. It was kind of crazy but like a gift from God. Then we spent much time in prayer praying for the salvation of those here that do not know the truth of Jesus. It was a great time and really focused us on truth for the day.

We had a lot of fun just playing and enjoying each other

Davis got a Thai Christmas hat which he was very excited about. As we say, "things are not bad here, they are just very different!"

David got a shoe rack which he was very excited about. Since we live in a country where you don't wear your shoes inside, he likes to at least keep them organized outside.

We also enjoyed opening a care package from the States from my parents and my mom's Sunday school class. It had some much needed items. Did you know you can't get solid deodorant in Thailand? Well we have several of them now for us all. Davis also got some much needed shorts that are actually the right length (they are all short on him here). Also got some shaving cream, Amercia gum (gum here tastes like cough medicine) and much more. It is amazing at how what you get so excited about getting for Christmas changes when you live in a different country. Samantha literally yelled "woohoo" about the deo.

We ended Christmas Day going to our teammates house and having dinner and games with them and another family. It was a lot of fun!

All together Christmas ended up being a great time in Thailand. It was hard being away from our family and all those in the states we love. But through all your prayers, God bless the time and we enjoyed it all. Thank you so much for your prayers, care packages, card, thoughtful emails and so much more!

School days!

It seems crazy but yes, David and I are back in school. We attend the local University for their Thai language program and I have to say it is intense. It is crazy how much info. we take in every day and how many new vocabulary words we get each day. This language is very difficult but by the grace and power of God, we will get it! So we just wanted to share a little about our school days. We decided we can do it best through pictures.

This is the sign for the University as you drive in. Yes, we do actually know what those letters are and can write them and know what they mean. I guess we have learned something at school!

This is also at the beginning as you drive into the campus. Just a reminder to us all that the people here are Buddhist.

This is the language building where all or our classes are held. We stay here all day long Monday through Friday. We have 5 different classes; reading, handwriting, speaking, listening and writing sentences. It's intense but we are learning much!

On December 16, at school we had 'Sport Day'. It is a day when the language classes come together and play local sports. This means we did some really crazy relays but had a lot of fun. This is a picture of about half of us that were there. As you will notice all of these are Chinese except 1 guy from Korea about 6 Thai people and then the two of us Americans. We kind of stick out but they are kind to us and we have a lot of fun with them.

David is ready for the tug of war relay. They like to pick the big, strong farangs for this type of event. Unfortunately our team lost that event.

After all the events the girls invited us over to come eat with them. We had a Thai buffet out on our rice mats and lots of fun just being together.

On Dec. 19-20 we went with our class and another language class at our University on an overnight fieldtrip to Phuu Chii Faa, which is a beautiful mountain in Northern Thailand. We had a great time and made lots of new friends from the other class. These are two of my classmates, Jiang Jinn and YaDi.

As we drove to Phuu Chii Faa we stopped many places along the way to see the beauty of Thailand. This was a gorgeous waterfall we stopped at to look at and to have a picnic on our rice mats.

It's amazing but poinsettas grow like trees here instead of just having a plant in a pot. They are beautiful and we saw many of them up in the mountains as we traveled and stopped along the way.

David with one of our teachers on our fieldtrip. We had a lot of fun with Aajan(means teacher in Thai) Joe.

This was the beautiful view outside of our cabin that we stayed in that night. Now cabins here are different. Basically it is a small concrete building with no insolation and no air. It was cool season at that time and it got down to 39 degrees that night. You can see how I slept in our room on the next picture.

This is when I was going to bed late that night. I had about 5 layers on my top half and 3 on my legs and feet. Then I had 3 blankets and gloves and scarf around my neck. I was somewhat warm then but couldn't really move much. It was basically like sleeping outside in the winter. But we had fun on our trip!

Soon after we got to where we would stay for the night, I decided to try to get them to play a game. You have to realize hardly anyone but us spoke English, it was mostly Chinese, Thai or Korean. So it is a challenge when you communicate but fortunately you can communicate love without words. And we love these people. So I broke out the UNO cards and we taught them how to play. It was so much fun!

They liked it so much we taught them our favorite game, Jump-In Uno which gets really crazy and we had much squealing and hollering going on in 4 different languages. David and I just laughed and laughed as we had so much fun! It took me back to our days of working with College students in Gainesville and I loved it! Wow, I have missed those days. We didn't keep score but each hand we determined who had the most points and that person had to sing a song by themselves. Well, David only had to sing 1 all night but I had to sing about 5 or 6. I took advantage of it and sang some songs about Jesus. Hopefully some of it stuck. We played cards late into the night, only stopping to eat dinner.





Speaking of dinner, this was one of our dishes that we ate. It was delicious! We had a lot of food and then got back to cards!

The next morning we all got up at 4:30 and went up to Phuu Chii Faa to see the sunrise. They assured us it was worth it to get up that early, freeze as we rode in the back of a truck to get close to the mountain and then walk a really long way to get to the top of it so you could see the sunset.



It was about 5:30AM when we arrived to the top of the mountain and it was pitch black up there. And there were these sweet hill tribe children up there all dressed up in their tribal dress. They would walk around and sing in their language, "don't you want to take your picture with me."  This is how many of the families in the hill tribes make some money for their families. It made me so sad to think they have to get up so early to do all of this just to try to have money to survive. Many children from America will never understand all the children here do and go through and how hard they work just to survive.

This was the beginning of the sun rising.

It was beautiful at every stage. It looks like water around those formations but it is a really a sea of fog.

Well they were right. It was worth it. It was amazing as we stood there and watched all that God had created.

God says all of creation cries out and testifies of who He is. As we watched we prayed that that would be happening at that moment with those who were with us. We had a group of 40 with us and only 4 of us know the truth of Jesus so we prayed His creation would cry out and make up for what we couldn't say because of language barriers.

Here are a few of us admiring the view.

It was beautiful all around us as we headed back down the mountain later that morning to get some breakfast!

We stopped at another place on the way home that day and as my classmates and husband climbed up to see another view, I decided I wanted to sit with this view. These precious boys were near a worship place and I went and sat there and they came and talked with me for a while. Children are not intimidating at all so I was able to speak much Thai with them. It was fun. Sitting here I also had the opportunity to speak with a monk (which doesn't usually happen) and a few Thai visitiors. I enjoyed it all!

My new friends, the little hilltribe boys loved looking at themselves in the camera so they decided they needed to take a picture of me too. They did pretty good!