Live and plugged in Cambridge

I scarcely believe its only been a week since I left the Schloss. I'm in full swing and halfway through my time serving with the Cambridge International Outreach.

Coming here was tough. The Schloss is a place where theres tons of visitors already, so each person there has to strike a balance between having a comfortable circle of friends, yet also meeting new people.

What basically happened was I left that community on a Sunday morning, and by Sunday afternoon I was surrounded by the new Cambridge Int'l Outeach (CIO) team, 40 people from all over. Everyone else was very excited and everyone was getting to know everyone, however I was still coping with the idea of leaving the Schloss community. So it was tough, I wanted to retreat... I am getting used to it now. Community is important - after getting more comfortable with the team it has been easier for me to extend myself and start to open up more to the int'l students (which is the whole point of the ministry lol).

The days are busy here, the weekends we have more time off, but my average day look like:
Wake up around 9:30 (staying with a host family), bike over to our main HQ, we have a time of singing and then someone teaches from a bible passage (we're going through 1 John), then morning tea, then a seminar teaching us about different cultures, then lunch, then prayer time, then afternoon activities (sports, flyering, getting to meet int'l students and invite them for evening events), coffee break, small group discussions, dinner, cafe setups, then we open up our 2 cafes. Int'l students come and we hang out with them, get to know them, host optional bible studies, etc. We close up at 11:00, clean up, debrief, and I bike back home around midnight. Five days of this in a row and I was really ready to have the weekend off.

Cambridge is a beautiful city, a lot of history, and plenty of sites to see and things to do. The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival is on, so we went to see Hamlet in the gardens of the famous King's College here which was neat.

Cambridge is interesting, mostly a university town, so there's tons of students. However during the summer most of the regular students leave, and what happens is Cambridge has many language schools that then open up, with people from all over the world coming to study and learn English. Many are only here for weeks at a time, its quite an incredible thing to see - and all the multinational friendships that come out of that. So all sorts of bizarre mixes of ethnicities are seen.

I have to go - miss you all very much.