Back Again Week 24 From Hong Kong

Hello all,

   Well this was fast. Nothing much happened in the few days since I wrote last. However this time I will include the pictures from the last two weeks. 

   There were only two large things that happened both of which were yesterday. After Church the four missionaries in my ward met with the Bishop to discuss goals for this next month. That was a lot of fun. He is a really happy person and fun to joke around with. We have been struggling to find new investigators so that took up most of our meeting. There is a mission rule about "new years red packets" where if it is money we are not allowed to accept it. So most members know this and therefore dodge the rule by giving us coupons that we can use for groceries. However we told Bishop that what we really wanted was people to put contact information or times for a meeting with their friends so we could meet with them and start teaching more people.

   The other thing that happened yesterday was we were able to meet with the two ladies from Main land. We brought the Mandarin sisters with us and a ward member who had very good Mandarin. That was fun. I was able to understand what was happening and even share a little bit so that was really awesome. Supper hard though because I had to take the Mandarin and translate it to Cantonese and then to English. Good mental exercise though. 

   Chinese New year is starting and to participate in the Holiday today all we are doing is cleaning the apartment. It is called a "deep clean" so that should be a fun experience. We had pancakes for breakfast and will be eating out for the rest of our meals today because soon the air will be mostly bleach haha. We have masks so it is ok. Also I will not be able to e-mail next week until Thursday. Sorry. 

Love,

伍長老

 Me and my new district leader and roommate

 A bad picture of my old district before the surprise move.  The sister in the middle is now home.

 Part of the monkey attack haha!

 Old roommates packing up before they had to leave (it was sad)

It was kinda cold this last week so our new roommates and I huddled around a heater which we had too keep on low to prevent the fuse from popping.

This mornings breakfast very good

Cleaning the refrigerator

Cleaning the Rolls Royce (if you don't understand why that is funny look up a picture of a Rolls Royce)

Week 23 from Hong Kong

Gordon attended the Temple on Monday so his preparation day was moved to Thursday.

Hello all,

   SUPRISE MOVES AGAIN. That is the big news that changed from this week. We came home for dinner and our roommates were home and packing and asked if we could cook for them. They had less than 24 hours to pack up everything and move. We were all very sad. We had been living together since November and we were super tight. So that was lame. However our new roommates are awesome and are named "Elder Powel" (He is my district leader) and "Elder Taylor". I expect that we will get to be good friends too it will just take time to get back to that same place.

   This week was also marked by an event that I swore would never happen... I... Bought a Selfie Stick. It is a lot of fun and should hopefully generate more pictures of me and people so yeah that was interesting. I would show some of the pictures but I forgot my card reader so... next week! speaking of which this e-mail comes again from the mall in Kowloon Tong.

   Also this week we were at the church and helping one of the ward missionaries with his english homework and when we looked out the window there was a swarm of like 15 or 20 monkeys on the roof. Which is how I now know the word for monkey in Canto. I have a lot of pictures but... next week you can see them. It was a lot of fun to watch them run around and the cute baby monkeys.

   This week was also 2 degrees and raining so it was pretty cold when we went finding. I had a pair of PJ's on under my suit pants and two sweaters. I had to rotate hands holding the umbrella and in my pocket to avoid frostbite. So that was a good way to spice things up a little. While we were doing that we would have been fine had we kept moving. However we ended up talking to a man for an hour and a half on the street. He was realy cool to talk to and was asking all the right questions he just didn't listen to us and by the time we finished with him we were absolutely frozen. I didn't stop shivering until I got in to bed that night.

   Then another night we were finding we met two girls from Main Land. So they spoke Mandarin so when we started talking to them in Cantonese they were very confused. luckily for us we were able to speak to them in English. It was awesome!!! I decided that I love people from Mainland. It is because most of them have not heard gospel stuff before so when we tell them about it they say "that sounds awesome, I want to learn more!" They were also really cool because they called me "wo" which is my name in Mandarin and the same name my grandpa had. SO that was a really cool experience. We have another meeting with them scheduled for this Sunday where we will turn them over to the mandarin speaking sisters in my zone. Lots of fun. 

   This week I almost ate a pig foot. Me and my roommates wanted to try it because they got it from a member. So we thought it out and it was at that point that we realized that none of us knew how to cook it properly so we played it safe and went to McDonalds instead...

That is all from this last week. I will be emailing next Monday so I will see ya then!

love,

Elder Walker

This picture was posted by another mom on the mission FB page.

I am still here. Week 22 from Hong Kong

Hello all,

   Before I forget I need to say that I will not be emailing next week but will the following Thursday as that is our Temple day.

   This is a fun fact from this last week. We had on Thursday three meetings with members from our ward. All three of which were named brother Chan. So we have to say their full name in order to keep them straight. There is also in total 6 brother Chan in my ward haha. Also we learned that the Cantonese word for Jedi is 長老, which is the same way to say "Elder" so that was cool.

   I had a fun realization this Friday. We were running back to our apartment after a lesson, when is say running I mean actually running, so that we could be back before 10. And I started smiling like an idiot and I realized that I was pretty much living out that dream everyone has at one time or another of being a spy. I was running, in Hong Kong through a secret tunnel in the Mall so that people wouldn't see me, in a suit, speaking a foreign language, after a meeting and running to get back to our secret apartment (yes it is secret most of the members don't even know where we live) before a crucially important deadline. I realized that that was and is the closest that I will ever come to being a 007 haha.

   This week I accidentally hurt one of the people we meet with feelings. He smokes and drinks a lot so his mind is pretty much fried so he really has the mind of a child left. Any way we were over at his house and the member made a comment about his necklace which was huge "jade" image. When the member asked how much he paid for it he said 200 which is really cheep (so it is fake) Then he started to pull out other "precious stones" and handing them to us. One was a bracelet which was supposed to be made of large stone beads. I looked at it and realized it had a bubble in it and it felt like plastic any way. So when I said that he took it back and examined it very closely and I saw that it upset him slightly. He handed me another bracelet to check and I said "no I don't know about this one, but I think it is real". He then spent the whole rest of the visit looking at the one I said was fake. So I'm not going to do that again haha. 

   Other than that it was a pretty standard week. It rained a lot and I went to sleep with the sound of rain on the window right next to my bed. That was really nice. Things Have stopped being strange to me here so that is great. It also means that I am not sure what you people would think would be funny or interesting haha. That is all for this week.

love you all,

伍長老

   

Cool street view from last week in Mong Kok 

Cool sign I found. After I took it all the Chinese ladies that were working in there said my name a lot and pointed at me so that was amusing. 

It was kinda cold one of these last days and this is what Comp study turned into.

Week 21 from Hong Kong

Hello all,

   This week has been a stressful one and a fun one all at once. It is fun how that works out. This last p-day we went to find a watch shop and it ended up being closed so we wandered around some more until we found a better one! We spent about 3 hours in there looking at all the different kinds. I eventually got a White one that I could use in the Temple. It was really pretty. It also had the day of the week in Chinese which was awesome. I was really excited for it. Problem was that it ended up getting switched at the end and I didn't notice until we got home. So that was lame. Though the watch I ended up with was equally pretty though the date is not in Chinese. 

   So the ward I am serving in has very few Young Single Adults. So every few weeks we will have a family home evening with them and the missionaries. We were in charge of the game and ended up playing liars dice. It was a lot of fun. Though it was really hard to explain in Canto. (For those of you who are wondering it is the game they play in Pirates of the Caribbean) So that was a lot of fun.

   Then we had a day where we got what is called "Yellow Rain" which means that it rains supper hard, but not hard enough to stay inside. There was about 3 inches of standing water in a lot of places. That made for quite the adventure. Also all the malls have leaks in them and instead of bothering to fix the leaks they just put a bucket in the middle of the floor. There were a lot of them. It kind of made me feel like we were living on a huge submarine. Until I went outside and then it felt like home.

   This Thursday we had 6 full lessons which is a lot and means that we did not get to do any of our studies. It also meant that we left the apartment at 8:45 am and then didn't get back until 10:00 pm that night. The lessons where of course in opposite corners from each other which meant a lot of running.

   We also got "Chanded" or fed 5 out of the last seven days. That was fun. Nothing too strange there. At least I don't think but I'm starting to not be able to tell what is weird anymore so I guess that is good. It was also nice because we didn't have to cook. One of those appointments was very interesting we went over to the Aoki family and had diner with them. They all speak English so the whole thing was in English. Throughout the whole appointment they were apologizing that their house was messy because they recently had a new closet delivered from IKEA. So we spent the next 2 hours building their closet for them. That was a lot of fun. 

   I also finished all my training!!! So I am now just a normal junior companion! So glad to be done with all the training stuff. 

   anyway that has been my week.

love you all!

-Elder Walker

Liars Dice

activity for English class. We played the song and they had to fill in the blanks

the watch

Week 20 from Hong Kong

Hello all,

   Well it is another week here in Hong Kong. For those of you who are wondering how you celebrate New Years as a missionary... you don't! haha. We were in bed and asleep at 11. The only thing that changed was that Church is at a different time and now I write 2016 on forms and things. 

   Ok this letter is going to primarily take the form of a story that I will get to in a moment. There is some news though with regard to the mission. Every "move" or period of 9 weeks we get to go to the temple. Usually this is just a district at a time and it is awesome! However this month it will be the entire Zone. After which there will be a 2 hour broadcast training form Salt Lake. Which means that either 1 we are getting Ipads, or 2 Mainland is opening, or 3 it is just a broadcast from Salt Lake. We are thinking it is either 1 or 3. So that will be really nice if we can use Ipads. 

   Here goes the story. So we are currently teaching a part member family the Leun family. They are shall we say interesting. The youngest daughter, who is still older than me, has been to several of our ward activities and so every once and a while we will go over to their house and she will teach us to bake something so that we can in turn teach it in our baking class on Saturdays. So this Friday we went over and we brought a member Joe who is an RM who served in California so is English is very good and he has been asking to come out with us so this was our first time using him. So we go over to the families house and Joe texts us and says that he is going to be a little late. This is no problem it happens every once and a while. However when we walked in we met the brother who we have never seen before. He was very nice anyway so we were talking kinda loud being excited that they were going to teach us some thing. Now usually the brother and Father are working so this was our first time seeing them. So we asked where the dad was and they pointed to one of the beds in the room. (That is normal here) and we saw him asleep on the bed. So needless to say we stopped talking so loud. They had us sit down and it was at this moment I noticed that the youngest daughter who comes to the activities some times had what I described in my journal as "a profound lack of pants" this meaning that she was in as near as makes no difference her underwear. It was at about this time that our member showed up. While he was introducing himself the dad who was still asleep sat bolt upright and looked at the clock and jumped off the bed and left the house quite violently. So that was interesting. Then when we asked what we were going to make they said that they didn't have any stuff to make today but that the brother and sister could go buy some stuff. So they left. This is about half hour into the lesson. So we chatted for a while. I couldn't understand most of it. Apparently it was mostly slang and various forms of obscenity. So that went on for about 40 min. Then the brother and older sister came back and said that they didn't have the stuff and that they bought stuff for sushi and if we wanted to come back the next day we could learn to make sushi. So since we had to get back home soon and our member was getting quite uncomfortable we decided to share a quick message and then run. So we asked "what are yalls feelings towards church?" (yall translates great in to canto.) and they went on a very long story about how they went to one where when they prayed there was loud thumping music and lots of lights and lots of people fainting (And people call us a cult haha). So that took another hour. and we got out of there. Our member then told us that he didn't want to come back the next day and we said that was fine. 

  The next day we went back and took the sister missionaries with us and it went great and we all learned how to make sushi and had a great time. We felt bad for out member so this last Sunday night we made cookies and brought them over to him. SO that made for an interesting week. I dare any one to beat that.

   I also learned a fun Chinese idem this week it is: "Taking your pants off to fart" which means "To do something unnecessary". which is a completely fine thing to say at the dinner table haha.

ok that's all for this week I hope everyone had a good new year!

love you all,

Elder Walker