TRIPPIN

This semester has become a funny cadence of hurried homework and Budapest days interrupted by long measured weekends abroad. It is a good and crazy way to live...but the tempo hurries us on faster and faster and now I can hardly believe I have about one month left in Hungary. (Ah! That shocked me just to type it.)

Two weeks ago we were heading northeast out of Hungary on our way to the Ukraine (not exactly a tourist hotspot). Our group was in light spirits, buoyed by the rare sunny, sixty degree weather. I didn't sleep at all in the vans on this trip, so I have a mental film reel of vibrant fall trees, standing in straight and tall rows along dirt roads or stolidly alone in flat country fields...row upon row of heavy sprawling vineyards staining houses and fences and fields purple and burgundy and blood red...a thousand rippling waves of honey-colored sunshine on overripe fields...
I thought that if we flipped the world around a bit, and east became west and west became east, and that black stain of lingering communism hung over England and France instead, Ukraine would be the world's Switzerland or Monaco. It was gorgeous. But then again, part of me was glad about the lack of Americans and ski slopes.

We spent a lot of time with the Ukrainian people--attending a reformation day service, ambling through Gypsy villages hand-in-hand with dark-eyed children, tip-toeing through cemeteries laden with flowers and ribbons to honour the dead (All Saint's Day is huge here), sharing meals with the local pastor and his family, holding babies in a hospital orphanage. This trip shook and stirred and delighted and troubled me...and I am very grateful for it.

All of a sudden, it is the eve of our next trip--Croatia--and I am not nearly done thinking on this one. But I figure that's ok because all these thoughts and experiences keep mingling and layering up and enhancing each other...so finally when some of it spills onto my blog it will be that much richer and more complete.

As always, thank you for your prayers. God is good.