Finally Got to Watch General Conference!

Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, Zhongzheng District, Taipei, Taiwan

Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, Zhongzheng District, Taipei, Taiwan

This week has actually gone by pretty quickly. We’re going to be moving into our new apartment on Thursday, which is super exciting! Finally we’ll be able to sleep in beds in a non-moldy apartment, instead of on the floor!

Last Monday, we went with one of the families my companion knows from a previous area – the wife is a less active, but the husband isn’t a member. Their family is awesome though! They just left to live in Florida for 6 months! They took us to Costco so we could buy a ton of food – which we, of course, did! We’ve now got enough muffins to last a couple weeks, as well as tortilla chips and salsa! We ended up spending like 4500 NTD there. They bought us a Costco pizza, which Elder Anderton and I finished off in the backseat of their car during the ride back to our apartment!

Zone meeting day!

Zone meeting day!

On Tuesday of this last week, my companion went on exchanges with the district leader – meaning that our district leader’s companion became my companion for a day. However, his companion is actually still in training as well; he’s only been on island for about 5 weeks now! This meant that I, more or less, became a trainer for about the next 24 hours since I was the one with more experience and better Chinese, given that I’ve been here for about 11 weeks! It was actually pretty fun – it wasn’t really too difficult to talk with people. Most of the time if we don’t understand, we can just tell them we don’t and they’ll attempt to explain it in a simpler way (hopefully). Also on Tuesday, we had our monthly zone meeting.

My companion and I are still working on revamping the English class program we have here. Our mission president has now talked with the president of the other mission in Taiwan and gotten approval for our changes to be used in all of Taiwan and for us to be able to use the other mission’s resources in our creation of videos and promotional materials. Right now we’re still trying to create an awesome new logo to use – hopefully we’ll get that done soon! Then from there we’ll be able to work on the tracts, banners, other English class materials, and the filming and editing of the promotional videos to be distributed on facebook and later on, possibly in public places like MRT stations and taxis! We’ve still got a lot to do, but it’s pretty enjoyable and we hope it will make a difference.

Another act of sacrifice...

Another act of sacrifice…

This past Saturday and Sunday we were able to watch General Conference. We have to watch it a week later because of the time it takes for translation – fortunately I didn’t hear too many spoilers before we were able to watch it! We all enjoyed being able to watch it here in Taiwan. At the end, Elder Holland really messed with everyone since most people thought he was going to be pretty serious, but then he turned out to be really funny! Actually many of the speakers did well at talking about some serious topics but still incorporating humor into their talks. Saturday evening, after the priesthood session and the women’s session, we went out as a district (plus some others) to Coldstone to get ice cream, which was super good!! (plus it was buy one get one free which was even better)

– Elder Austin Simonson
文長老

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