Church in Shenzhen

So far we've taken two long trips to go to some church services with the branches they have here. The first was in Shenzhen and the second in Guangzhou. Since the church is not officially recognized by the government, we met in a member's house in Guangzhou and at a hotel in Guangzhou. So first, the Shenzhen trip.

Shenzhen is a very large city, but most of it is used for housing. All the buildings you can see in this picture are just apartments.

And as you can see here, Wal-Mart is taking over the world. I was told that in Kunming there is even a 4 story Wal-Mart. Citizens beware!

We had church at a member's house who lived in a beautiful little community right by an international school. This pic is a view from the house toward the mountain right by it (I'm not sure what it's called).

The service was GREAT, partially becuase the speakers were great, partially because they had CARPET [it was so awesome... everyone took off their shoes at the door and the carpet was sooo soft. I have only seen carpet 2 places so far in China, and both were on the church trips], and partially because they fed us delicious, fatty, preservative-filled, processed American food. This pic is of my roomate and I down the street of really cool trees just after the service. We call it our sister missionary picture.

After the service we went our way exploring for a bit until it was time our bus left. This is a way cool bridge we came accross. For some strange reason it made me want to burst into the song and dance from Sound of Music, but unfortunately (fortunately for some) I don't think they sell lederhosen here :)

While exploring, we came upon this giant statue of a mermaid that I have cleverly edited while taking the picture. Apparently they are building some kind of marina or water park there.

Near that same place there is a whole shopping-ish area that reminded me SO much of San Fransisco There was a HUGE boat that was turned into a resturaunt.

And this was the HUGE anchor that went with the HUGE boat.

And these guys I know are no Clydsdales, but then again Chinese naturally have a smaller build.

Dragon statue. You will often see dragons wrapped around the poles of buildings for decoration and they are awesome!

On our way back we saw some more statues on a building, except these ones are randomly coming out from the side of the building.

And that concludes our Shenzhen trip. Until next time, Zai Chen!

(Picture taken at sunset near my apartment)