Daylight robbery

Yesterday night as is traditional here, everyone was re-assigned with a spiritual mission. That means getting a new patron saint for the year, a virtue to cultivate and a deceased friar to pray for. My patron for 2008 is St Peter of Alcantara - an extremely austere spanish friar who was spiritual director of St Teresa of Avila. My virtue to cultivate: daily examination of conscience. Deceased friar to pray for: Fr Scarrica; he died 3 years ago. Hope I'll hold out for the rest of the year with this intention!

Now you won't believe this but I bought a book from Amazon.com but when it arrived at the Post Office, I was taxed US$20 for it! This is terrible! Do you know of another country that opens your mail and then taxes you for things you buy legally overseas? That's why I tell you guys when you post things to me not to send them in big packs as it attracts attention and I'm slapped with a tax. And the worse thing is I need the books for my studies! I think what I can do is get Amazon.com to ship the books to HK and then a grp can bring it up to me; but this means waiting for a couple of months and I need the books immediately!

Urgent Appeal: I've been told by our Franciscan Corner/Bookshop guy that lots of migrant chinese workers come weekly to pick up any free chinese language magazines that I leave there. They really need some reading material in chinese. So can you guys be good enough as to send me yesterday's newspapers (chinese only) and Kung Kao Po that I can leave at our Center for thee poor blokes. They are so alienated from Israeli life and language and we're the only place they can gather and read something in chinese. Another nice thing you can do is sponsor - give me a gift subscription to Kung Kao Po or any other magazine/newspaper in chinese and I can then place it in the center for those guys to read. It makes them feel at home and know alittle more news about China. Please think about this ok?