Midterms week

This week is midterms in the Irish schools, which means the tests are next week, so the students have all of this week off to study, but in reality they’re traveling and hanging out with friends, but not at our café and therefore our business is cut in half and the lunch rush is slowed to a trickle. Mostly I get assigned odd cleaning jobs by Tommy like washing the windows or sweeping the alley- things that need to be done that we usually don't have to time to do. But the bulk of my time is spent chilling at the counter or with customers I've gotten to know. The business got so slow that Susan let us Taylor students off early to “study” as she put it, but I think we put out time to better use. As we ate our meal in the café, we were approached by a young man who is one of our regulars and seems well acquainted with most of the staff. His name was Adrian and we invited him to sit with us. He’s a student at NUI Galway studying History and Philosophy while working a night job at a pharmaceutical plant. We discussed everything from good hikes in remote places of Ireland, to Gaelic sports and American sports, to why he drinks coffee even though he hates it. He was a very talkative guy and pretty amusing seeing how he tricked Kelsie into thinking his name was Tiny Timothy or something ridiculous.
This evening at cell group, we had two new people join us: Swilly and Rose, sisters from Brazil. They spoke little English, but thanks to Ben’s Spanish and Kelsie’s French we were able to communicate and joined in our praise and Bible study. They were in Galway because their brother was in the hospital with some condition we couldn’t translate (“very ill” was all we got). We prayed for their brother and as we were praying, listening to Rose pray in French I realized what diverse nationalities were represented in our small group: Americans, Irish, Malaysians, Brazilians, and Kenyan all together studying God’s word and praying to Him in a variety of languages. In our class with Arden, we’ve talked about people group-targeted churches that are made up of ethnically and socio-economically similar people and the true church should be diverse like a little slice of heaven as Arden puts it. It was good to see this diversity in our little room.
Afterwards we started prank calling and Paul with too much sugar in his system is a sight to see. He called pretty much everyone who is usually in cell group, but couldn't make it that night and pretended to be Stephen Hawkings. It was pretty over the top. I'm looking forward to tomorrow even though we'll be working all day, maybe we'll get slap happy and things will get crazy and fun.