Paper Towels, Service, and the Christmas Devotional

Finally found something to start my Christmas wish list on…

Hello!

This week has also gone pretty well! Despite it still being pretty cold and me bringing only one coat (I won’t need any warm coats in Taiwan!), it’s really nice here. Today we went to the temple to do initiatories before coming back to the MTC to do laundry and write emails. We rotate each week between doing an entire session and just initiatories; last week we did a session.

While most of the elders were out of our residence hall, someone took the time and effort to make a nice line of paper towels across the bathroom floor. You’ve got to appreciate the amount of time it took to do that though…the paper towels only come out a little bit at a time! The photo above is of the scene before it got ripped up.

Looks like Elder Simonson got the boot...

Looks like Elder Simonson got the boot…

This last Thursday was the first time we did service…the Thursday before was the special Thanksgiving service project, so we got out of our regular service activity. We found out that for service each Thursday, we’ll be cleaning all four floors of toilets in the residence building across from ours. To be honest, it’s actually not that bad since they’re cleaned everyday by someone, so they don’t have time to get dirty (hopefully…).

We were able to watch the Christmas Devotional live with all the other Elders and Sisters here at the MTC. It’s always fun to hear music since we’re not allowed to listen to music here (despite being allowed to when we’re actually out in the field). Every time we have a devotional, we usually sing 3 prelude hymns before actually beginning, and then the usual one at the beginning and one at the end; this time we ended up singing like 5 prelude hymns and then about 4 more because we were still waiting for the live feed from Salt Lake.

They all got the memo about gray slacks day...

Laoshi and the three amigos; apparently they all got the memo about gray slacks day…

I  have included some pics with two of our Chinese teachers. The picture (directly above) that has my two companions in it as well is with the teacher that is going to another district this upcoming week, so we’ll see him down the hall, but he won’t be teaching us anymore. The other pic is with the teacher that we’ve had since the very beginning. I haven’t had a chance to get a picture with our third teacher yet. He got back from his mission in Taiwan Taipei (yay!) in June. It’s really nice since I can talk to him about how everything is over in Taiwan as he was there fairly recently.

We have to clean how many toilets today?

We have to clean how many toilets today?

Finally, here’s a nice, candid picture of one of the sisters in my district while we were waiting for the laundry to be done. We’re working on accumulating a nice collection of candid pics of her so she can have a slideshow of them when she gets home in about 17 months now.  😂

See you in about 23 months and 1 week!
Elder Austin Simonson

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