Monday, August 21, 2006
6.8.06
the bank is amazing, by whatever standards. We got here at about 11am today, after a bus ride in which we talked about evolution, polo and nelson’s stinky shirt. Things don’t dry properly in those stupid ac rooms.There is a tennis court, swimming pool, sports complex with indoor basketball, badminton, ping pong, billiards, cards room, and some random game which involves pushing a little metal disc across a long, smooth table and getting it to stop on a mark with points on. After the NIT life of sprinkling radiators, broken water heaters and blackouts all around, this place is surreal. Looking at it in context, this is a normal bank training center— its rather cold and to me, unattractive in fact- a typical Chinese style establishment. The façade is all grayish white tiles and there;s this huge billboard over the top of the flat roof that says Beijing MInsheng Bank. But compared to what we’ve been living like, this is glorious. I make it sound like NIT was hell, when really, it wasn’t. The thing was that it was just frustrating and annoying because everything looked fine, but inside everything just didn’t work. It seemed that the default state of every electrical or electronic appliance in that place was faulty or broken. When you were in a hurry, or wanted to get things done, or simply wanted to live, you couldn’t do it without having to run to about 20 different management and logistics people in between. I guess it really taught me not to take things for granted.
I don’t see things like this happening here. Everything is pretty slick. The canteen here is phenomenal. It’s a buffet type thing and there;’s so much choice.
I am afraid that I’ll get spoiled or distracted here., I know myself. When there’s work to be done, I’ll do it., but in the interim, the spaces which could be used to make things better, I sometimes rationalize that there;s no point, and if there are alternative things to do, I’ll do them. Yesterday, I prayed that god will help me, and help all of us, to fight our own battles. This is one of my battles, ironically. Humans are so difficult. Whether in comfort or discomfort, we are always straying from the goal.
I had an interesting conversation with Jason over lunch. We talked about relationships, and whether it is that there is 1 person or a pool of many people, of whom you choose one. Jason thought the former, and I the latter. And we both agreed that sometimes, people make mistakes. I still cannot accept how mistakes and remedying the mistake is frowned upon in the marriage context. People make mistakes in all things, so why is it unbiblical to make mistakes here? We also talked about friendships becoming relationships, and how that’s hard sometimes. Hard to tell when one bleeds into the other, and hard to define the boundaries. i think these things are complicated. Why do we always gravitate toward them?
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home