Saturday, January 19, 2008

At 'The World's Largest Resort'

Thankfully the claim refers to capacity, not to the size of the property. Still, with 4000 guest rooms in five large buildings, and 50 conference rooms of various sizes, several pools (plus the beach), one could easily be anonymous here.

Something that surprises me: there are a lot of Russians here. I hear their accents in the elevator, see signs written in the alphabet.

The conference I'm here to attend starts in earnest Sunday evening, although as the event is really a retreat the schedule has lots of open spaces. Meanwhile, there have been plenty of people to hang out with and I've had several very fruitful meetings already. Yesterday's 7:30 breakfast meeting didn't get over until 11:00 but has brought some new ethnographic opportunities my way.

In the afternoon I spent time hammering stuff out with someone from the HQ with whom I hope to start a new missiological initiative - a quarterly magazine to help equip women for effective church-planting. All rather tentative, and we need to go slow, but promising.

PS - the international director of our agency knows me by name. Weird, huh? Nice, though.

5 comments:

paulmerrill said...

Looks like fun!!

It's FREEZING here now. Be glad you're in the warm climes.

Megan Noel said...

glad you arrived safely! and it was not a problem being early -- but with 4000 rooms, sure they always have one available!

Anonymous said...

Hey, are you showing up on/near our doorsteps after your fun in the sun up north (of us)? We never heard back from you after emailing in Nov. . .hope you're having fun & don't want you to feel bad if you can't make it down this way. We just want to be ready either way! :) Take care & keep enjoying the work, and hope you can enjoy some beauty/sunshine too. CO is too cold for me right now.

Marti said...

Jules - sorry for dropping the ball on communication. No, I won't make it further South. Pity to be so close... even though I am of course deeply chicken about managing int'l travel by myself and found the prospect of setting it up awfully scary. But the real reason I'm not coming to see you is that we had to push our ethnography training from Jan. to Feb. and it starts a scant week after I return, so I'll need every moment. Six days of training and then I go straight to Indiana. I had to give up the prospect of a few days with your clan but will try to console myself with a few days with the Bennetts! Well, it's all good. Feeling the need to pace myself though.

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