China Day 2: (I must start today's blogpost with an update. I wrote that the first thing I thought when we arrived at the Great Wall was; "man you can see this from space." So today I looked on the Internet for a photo of the Wall from space and it turns out that is a popular myth. You can't actually see it from space...I know I was bummed too. But it is an impressive site nonetheless.) We woke up fairly early in Beijing and flew to Chengdu today. The flight is about 2.5hrs and everything went smoothly. As we flew into Chengdu I looked out the window and remember thinking "this is the China I came to see." It was green and lush and not as densely populated as Beijing. Pr. John Yu met us at the airport with a van and a driver. We were whisked off to the hotel before dinner. We met some of the pastors and seminary professors in Chengdu and had dinner wit them. They all used western names for our convenience. So the names you'll be reading are not really their given names. James is a pastor and church leader, Joshua is a seminary professor at the Sichuan seminary, and is a seminary educated leader awaiting ordination. Joshua spoke decent English and between him and Peter we were able to get to know our hosts a bit better. Pastor Wei joined us that evening for dinner as well. He is the chair of the Sichuan Christian Council and a terrific church leader. He holds an office in both the church and provincial government. Pastor Wei was able to join us for the remainder of our trip. We really spent the evening getting to know each other a bit better and spent a lot of time talking to Joshua about what the seminary was like. He teaches systematics and English language. There is a strong emphasis on practice and vocation rather than a strictly academic environment in the training of pastors. It sounds like they work to maintain a balance between academics and actual ministry time in the formation of their leaders. The night we met was the last day of class for the seminary and he was excited to tell us about all the homework he'd loaded the students up with before they left. For our group, I think our heads were still spinning to be in China. We were still in the midst of culture shock getting around and knowing what to do. Luckily we had Peter Chen with us and he was a wise and faithful shepherd for us. We ate at a terrific restaurant in called the Prince Kitchen. It was a lot of fun to meet some of the leaders of the Chinese Christian church. We went to a few tourist-shopping areas and called it a night. This is a picture from my first afternoon in Chengdu from the window in my hotel room. You can see the dense urban population and the city goes on as far as you can see.

We called it a night and went for some sleep. The time zone is a big one to get around so sleep was difficult at times. The next day we went to the Panda Research Center and had a great time. The animals were active and playing with each other. I've got some great Panda photos. Here is statue at the entrance

I didn't know they came in red. Smaller than Giant Pandas. Look for tomorrow's post. You'll see more pictures of Pandas and we start seeing some ministry sites!