Day 5 to 8

Day 5 (Saturday 26 June)
On Saturday we went to the Richmond Hill Grill and Chill, mainly for the worship team to lead some worship. They were going to have barbeque and various acitvites, but because it was raining, there were not as many people as they expected, and we could not be outside for the barbeque. They had some people outside to barbeque the food and bring it in, it was pretty good! We had a watermelon competition, but the only one in our mission team who managed to finish the watermelon at all was Minh Thu.

Preparing for worship. Gloria is with the Sunny side up kids.

After eating we went to the main church building to play dodgeball with the other youth. It was decent fun, played for quite a while before we finished for the day. Jim Chen came by to visit us too with his tiny son.

After the Grill and Chill we went home for a shower and then bought some takeaway from T&T to Ho-Ming’s house to have worship practice. The ones who didn’t practice watched Ho-Ming’s kids and tried to keep them from crying or disturbing those who were practicing. We also played some Street Fighter VI, which is a ridiculously difficult game even on the easy difficulty.

Day 6 (Sunday 27 June)
Today we went to tons of church services! At 9:00 in the morning Leon and Tina went to the Mandarin service, while the rest of us went to the youth service. Then at 11:00 me and Tina went to the English service, Leon, Elin and Minh Thu went to the Cantonese service, and the others stayed for the second youth service. At 11:50 Tina, Elizabeth, Nina and Hanfeng went to Barrie Christian Community Church for a Mandarin fellowship. Tore, Johan, Leon, Vilhelm, Enoch, Elin and Minh Thu stayed behind in our respective church services, and we went up to the office to eat KFC takeaway. The KFC bucket was huuuge! Then we went to Aurora Christian Community Church to share a bit and join their youth and children’s fellowship.

The worship teams from RHCCC were quite good. And the sermon at the English service was pretty interesting. It was about families in the bible, saying how many of Abraham’s ancestor’s families who actually had a lot of family trouble, but in the end God still used them to do his work. I think the point being made was that we shouldn’t be so focused on troubles in our families that we forget about letting God use us for doing his work.

The first youth service didn’t have so many youth, maybe around 30-40 people, but on the second youth service the room was almost full (or so I heard). In both of the youth services we lead the worship and then had three team members share our testimonies to the youth, with Ho-Ming talking briefly to start and finish the services. We later heard from Gloria, a church intern, that one girl went to her to ask about the gospel after the 9:00 youth service, and that girl decided to accept Christ, which is pretty touching!

Aurora Christian Community Church is a “child church” of RHCCC, and was made in an industrial part of Toronto, to acommodate for the famlies who were living there. It was a smaller church and had many young families from China, there were lots of little kids at the Sunday school! The youth service didn’t have so many people when we went, because it was vacation or so.

Barrie Christian Community Church is a small church with mainly Mandarin-speaking Chinese. The church was probably smaller than our church in Oslo. The team members that went there weren’t sure, but I’m guessing that it is also a “child church” of RHCCC, since they sent us there.

After all the church services we went First Markham Place with Ho-Ming’s parents (since Ho-Ming was busy and we needed a ride), and we walked around a bit and then ate at the food court there.

Great food offers at Markham place!

 
Final photos with Ho-Ming’s parents.

Day 7 (Monday 28 June)
We went to Wonderland with Ethan, Scott, Jeremy and Janice(?)! It was superexpensive and they try to extort money from you every way they can. You are not allowed to bring any snacks or food or soft drinks, only water (and candy) was allowed. Additionally you are forced to pay for a two-day ticket, which they called a single-day ticket with an “extra day for free”. Parking costs 10$, and pastor Ivy also accidentally drove to the parking lot instead of the dropoff point, and had to pay 10$ because she couldn’t drive out without going through the parking lot.

It was pretty fun though, they have a lot of rollercoasters, and we took the two water rides which made us completely soaked, making the heat more bearable. Some of us ate a giant cookiewich, which was soft-ice cream layered between two giant cookies, with chocolate pieces on the side. The thing was probably bigger than a Big Mac, and it’s probably the first time some food I bought is bigger than the example they have in the photo! I was the only one who actually ate the whole thing by myself.

At night we went to Maison du Japon for a sushi buffet dinner with Ho-Ming and his family. It was okay, nothing spectacular, but got pretty full in any case. Gloria also joined us for the dinner. Then we went to Ho-Ming and his parents place to get our luggage and to say our final goodbyes, before we went to Ivy’s place.

Day 8 (Tuesday 29 June)
On our first day with pastor Ivy we went to her office to have some briefing about our schedule for our weeks with her. After that we ate at The Dumpling King for lunch, before going to Yorkdale for shopping. It’s a huge mall, but it didn’t really have more stores than “normal European” malls, it’s just that the stores were all bigger. The iPad was still sold out though.

After shopping we went back to Ivy’s place to do a bit of practice and preparation, then we went to Chako Barbeque for Korean BBQ!