As most of you know, we’re preparing to work with a Bible translation organisation. Whatever you think about Bible translation, if you understand what goes into translating anything, you can have nothing but respect for those who do it, irrespective of their motives.

In the library the other day, I came across an unpublished book that originated in the 1970s at Ukarumpa, the base where we’re heading to in Papua New Guinea. It had a fascinating title:

A COMPILATION of VERNACULAR

to ENGLISH RENDERINGS of

KEY NEW TESTAMENT TERMS

TAKEN from VARIOUS

PAPUA NEW GUINEA

LANGUAGES

Hmm… I thought to myself, I wonder what this is. Each double page spread inside had key Bible terms on the right hand page in English and, on the left page, in English was a list of glosses of terms that had been used to express the concept of the key word. Some of them were amazing, most were fascinating, a few were downright hilarious.

IDOLS were deceiving expert gods, TEMPT was to pull one’s feet, RANSOM was the commercially appealing buying to save, REPENT becomes think with different ideas and ANGEL was sky man, a Marvel Comics hero just waiting to be drawn.

And so, I thought I’d pick a few choice morsels and send them your way. See how you get on with the quiz below.
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Well, all of you lovely people who over the years have encouraged me to get my writing published can finally rest easy cos it’s finally happened. I didn’t do much about it though… it comes naturally to the truly gifted apparently

I didn’t call them, the FT called me.

On our EurAsiaTour trip back overland from Korea to the UK, we travelled through Bosnia. There, I blogged the city of Mostar. This was picked up by a journalist working for the Financial Times weekend magazine for a section they run each week called That was Then, This is Now. The weekly feature compares travel writing of a place from two sources, one historical and the other contemporary. Mine was the contemporary one.

After a bit of legal wrangling over them not confirming my permission before publication (it’s due out today) and just how much this was worth to them (we settled out of court), I’m happy to say that I’ll be very proud to receive my complimentary copies of the magazine to bore people stupid with over the coming decades. You can read it by downloading the pdf.

I’m a published writer. I’m a published writer. I’m a published writer. I’m a… hmmmm…..

Looking towards Oxford from the Chiltern Hills

Hello all. In keeping with our promise, it’s time for another installment. This time, it’s more natural than breeding rats and far more beautiful I can assure you.

We’ve got some lovely countryside in the south of England and in Buckinghamshire in particular. We’re actually living in an area called the Chiltern Hills. Grabbing a couple of Finns (as you do), we headed out for a day walking in these hills recently. 

Timo and Eline were studying with us. They’ve now left to return to Finland and we hope to see them in January in Papua New Guinea as we’re both on the list for the basic training course there. While they were in the UK, we wanted to show them some British culture.

Now, when the summer sun’s shining on the grass of England, what better thing to do then than to walk to a pub for a Ploughman’s?

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We have a friend, Anne, on the course we’re currently study in Language and Culture Acquisition whose husband, Doug, is a keen rat breeder. This has to be seen to be believed and last week, after dinner at their place, we were introduced to the clan. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you remember Yvonne and Ye, the wonderful couple in Beijing who hosted us when we stayed there for four days in March? Well, they’ve been keeping us up to date on how things in the city have been gearing up for and enjoying the Olympics and yesterday, when the closing ceremony took place, Yvonne was there!

We were watching it on TV here in the UK thinking, wow, Yvonne is right there. Unfortunately, she only had one ticket so Ye wasn’t able to go. She’s blogged her experience really well so I’d encourage you to read it and see her pictures. Why not comment to thank her for it? Click the link below.
Visit Yvonne’s blog.

so sorry everyone. We’ve been pretty busy but we’ve also been a bit lazy when it comes to this blog. Every time I write an email, my conscience gets me because it says “keep up to date with us” with a link to this blog. I don’t think the blog works in terms of keeping up to date with us as we hardly ever do it.

So, as a sign that we are committed to keeping this blog going, we give you a rainbow…

Click on it to see it full size if you want.

This was one of two double rainbows that we had within a week here at Horseleys Green, a tiny village just west of High Wycombe in southern England. The weather this summer in the UK has been very rainy but there have been some very sunny times too which have led to these rainbows. We’ve never seen such intense rainbows in our lives - shame we didn’t get the camera soon enough to catch them at their best.

This rainbow is over the building where we’re staying at the moment while we do language and cultural training in preparation to head to Papua New Guinea in January.

if you are quick and you visit the personal bit of our website today (UK time) you’ll be able to see something Sheena and I are going out for lunch today to celebrate

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Here’s a picture for you.

Now, for those of you who follow this blog abroad and have never been to Stockton on Tees, a question: Something that most of you use regularly all over the world was first established here. What is it? A little clue for you if you want is that the road on the right is called 1825 Way.

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Standing in Sargans, on the slip road of the autoroute to Zurich, we thought a ride to the city would be a sure thing. Not so, by 2pm it was cold, starting to drizzle and half of Switzerland had ignored us except for one chap who risking someone driving into the back of him had stopped to tell us that he was only going about five miles down the road. Kind of wished we taken the lift just to see how far it would have got us, but he was insistent that where we were was better than where we would be if he took us.

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Here’s an interesting little fact: there are more people in our single church in Korea than the entire population of the country of Liechtenstein. Have a think about that and, if you can really grasp that statistic, it will give you some perspective on both nations.

Like virtually everyone else who says they’ve been to Liechtenstein, we planned simply to pass through it. For one thing, it’s expensive to stay in. wikitravel.org recommends staying, as we did, in Feldkirch in Austria. For another thing, you’d be really hard pushed to find any real reason for staying more than a day anyway. There’s simply little here of interest. Don’t take my word for it. History reveals that, when the land for the country was originally given to the princes of Liechtenstein (originally Austrian), they didn’t bother coming to visit it for 120 years. We were curious to see what all the fuss wasn’t about.

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