Day 7 - BICF and the Silk Market

We left the hotel for Beijing International Christian Fellowship at 7am. BICF is a church for foreigners - you have to show your passport to go to church there. They rent a large building with a huge auditorium and stage. There are two services on Sundays in this building, but many throughout the city in all languages. The congregation is primarily made up of diplomats, foreign assignees and students from all different nations and has about 4K members. Once again they have quite the set up, but the AV guy can't get the program with the slides going. He's rebooting repeatedly so we start the service without the use of lyrics displayed. James makes mention that we are supposed to be displaying words. Eventually they get it going and I shoot the words on the screen. About half way through the AV guy figures out that I'm with Vanguard, he thought I was with BICF. Once the sermon started I exited the backstage area and sat against the back wall in the auditorium to listen to Phillip Yancey speak. I was soo excited to hear him since I love the book "The Jesus I Never Knew", I was disappointed, much better writer than speaker - not that he was bad, but I've heard better.

Now the fun begins - We have a pretty narrow table for the CDs and have all 7 titles lined up, but it was a mob several layers deep - and the mob mentality took over. People were buying whatever and we were passing money back and forth, after the first service we sold at least 350 cds since we brought in ¥35,000 and were offering multiple cd discounts. Before the end of the second service, a woman from the table next to us asked us to not let people spill over on to her side (as if we have any control over that). We completely sold out of cds after the 2nd service and had people wanting to order cds. We are having CDs shipped to Cheng du from California.

I talked to Lynn about why do they need to have a house church since it seems like gospel can be preached, she said that if a church is registered they are controlled by the government. Also, the government controls who can go to the ICF churches (hence the passport requirement). There is a "house" church that started with 20 people a couple of years ago and now has 1000 members. They obviously don't meet in a house.

After church we went to a "Pizza" buffet for lunch' it's a combo of american and chinese food. The pizza has no tomato sauce, the dough is like flakey biscuit dough and the cheese is unlike any other, but it's still tasty. I had dragon fruit and yellow watermelon which looks good, but doesn't really taste like anything. As Dustin Ginn says, nothing tastes like I think it's going to.

We were driven to the Silk Market - more about that later. First, James, Teresa and I went to the bank and changed $5K each into Yuan - not my own money, obviously. The government only allows $5K per passport and all of the bills need to be perfect and I do mean perfect. we had a couple of bills rejected because there are yellow spots the size of an eraser on them and a couple more are rejected because there is a small tear (about an 1/8 of an inch on a bill. Yikes! James asked me if I want to carry any of it - I don't.

The Silk Market is an experience in every sense of the word. More than silk is sold there and everything is negotiable. Teresa and i toured it together. I bought a silk top, a jacket I can use for walking, a couple of christmas/birthday presents and a pair of sunglasses. We went downstairs to the luggage/handbag floor. Oh. My. Gosh. There are 2 - 3 girls from each side shoving Louis Vuitton wallets in your face - "Lady, lady, you need Louis Vuitton.' About 50 feet into the aisle I turned around to Teresa and said "I imagine this is what Hell is like." We had to leave. Even on the other floors we were constantly accosted "Lady, lady, you need underwear", "Lady, lady, you need . . . ." And heaven help you if you try something on but don't want to buy it "Lady, I nice to you, you try on, how come you no buy?" I actually had some grab my arm.

After a while, we caught up with Cory and others and headed over to Starbucks. I got a Green Tea/Black Sesame frappucino which is really good. It was nice to be out of the hustle and bustle and relax.

From the Silk Market we went to the Beijing acrobats. It was excellent, amazing how strong both the men and women are.

Only a few of us went out to dinner since we have to leave the hotel at 4:45 the next morning. Teresa, Brianna, Natasha. Faith, Michael, Amanda, Teresa and I went to RBT. It's a sit down restaurant, the seats are actually swings made out of planks of wood and rope. I ordered meat and noodles, but got something like meat and udon. it's good, not what I ordered, but I don't really care. While we are eating, Faith looks at me and says "will you hang out with us?" I assured her I would, she said "No, I mean when we get back. I hate it when we get get back from a tour and we don't hang out anymore." I told her I'd be happy to hang out with her.