TaBan

So I should start off and apologize for the short email last week. And I'm going to apologize even more for today's short email again hahaha. Just been having too much fun lately I guess... :-)

This week was also super short since it was only 5 days. So nothing super special happened. 

But some updates on my situation here in Taiwan. Our investigator pool currently is a little small and a little HaiHao.. (meaning so-so). So thats a bit of a bummer as those of you who are RM's understand. But it's still moving, just slower..

Elder Miller is my new companion. Everyone says its hard to have your breaker come in. But it honestly hasn't been. Last night we were walking down this long dark road talking about our lack of alone time haha and I had this realization as I was telling him I don't mind having a companion. It's that as long as you are doing what you're supposed to be doing (aka wasting your lives away in the work, literally) then its really easy to have a companion. It's actually essential. There's just too much to do all the time and too much to remember. I would give up if I didn't have help. There's a lot on your plate all the time.. to say the least....

And lastly, and the reason for my title this week, (translation=pedals) if you thought it was funny to imagine me riding a bike all of last week on a bike with only one pedal, just think of how funny it is that this past week my other pedal fell off as well so I'm now pedal-less. But I haven't minded it too much. Exciting thing with that is now I can go join the circus when I get back or create a new Olympic event for pedal-less bike racing and go win some awards. So it isn't all bad.

if you look closely you'll notice there are no pedals :-)

I spy a panda!!

How did they get this beast from Kenya to Taiwan - I don't even know...

train life.

Love you all. Miss you like crazy. Hope you have a lot of fun this week and then tell me all about it (wink,wink)

my boy GuanYou. Left for Taizhong Mission Field this past week

DiaoDong

Transfers!!

I now have my new companion, Elder Miller with me in ZhongLi and I'm excited for what is ahead! We have already got a great start to the week and I am really optimistic for what lies ahead.

Because today was our temple day, where we go to Taipei on Wednesday instead of Monday, hence the slightly late email, so I apologize for that. But Taibei is the best thing ever so I'm not complaining.

I don't have much time to say much, however, to cap this week into one paragraph: Elder Willes and I parted ways which broke our RC's heart and so she has recently flooded our ZhongLi apartment with all this food we honestly don't have room for! She's great to us. Elder Miller came in and I've had some fun introducing him to everyone and taking over the ward for the time being. New missionaries have not come in for a long time so lots of areas have closed down recently, and so that also means that my time left in ZhongLi is 100% unpredictable. Unfortunately Elder Miller's bike has not arrived from his last area yet, so this past week I have been making it do on a bike that has no left pedal, and a right pedal that is about to fall off any time now. I've lost some weight, but I think that only means that my muscle is slowing decaying and my fat is replacing it.. I ate thousand year old egg and gagged it down, but I'm still determined to develop a taste for rotten food. I am literally on the phone for 2 straight hours every night because all the sudden the ward has decided to bombarde me with all this hecticness that I don't even know where it comes from. Chinese is coming along well, after Sunday when I went home and realized I had little to no struggles with the language that made me excited. And finally today I was able to take a kid from my ward here through the temple for his first time as his escort which was a major privilege and also awesome to do a session in Mandarin Chinese.

Here's my buddy GuanYou.  Gonna be a rockstar missionary!

Taiwan for you.  As well as Elder Miller.

My life is great out here, I'm super happy with everything. I'm going to see Panda's today at the Taipei zoo, so don't be jealous when you get a lot of dope pictures next week :-)

Life is complete. Nothing is missing. (except the left pedal on my bike...but I mean I'm just picking up on all these new skills like riding a pedalless bike. I don't even notice it anymore.)

Ai Ni!

that's definitely a pup believe it or not

Smores in Taiwan.  A first for this place!

Taiwan is pretty as it turns out.

starting to pick up on the Asian look am I?

MeiHao de ShiJie

Beautiful world.

Taiwan is gorgeous. Everything about it. (except the air quality, those of you in America need to take a couple deep breaths of some fresh crisp American air for me!)

It's getting harder and harder to remember what happened in the past week and what happened a month ago. Things just blur together hard core. It's kinda nuts honestly... 

Some highlights for this week:

Probably the most hilarious sight of my mission. We were out finding in the park in the middle of ZhongLi one day and we came across a Korean lady who was christian. So we were talking with her and her little meimei (daughter) for a bit. We were getting right to the important part of asking her to learn more about our church when this TERRIBLY drunk man bumps into Elder Willes. We both turn around to see who it is and it's this man who is side-shuffling with his back to us. And he continues to just slide (very slowly) past right in the middle of us and the woman and her child as we are trying to talk to them and the poor little meimei looks absolutely terrified. He passes completely by so we carry on for about 30 seconds again before he finally completely looses his balance and FACE PLANTS hard core onto the ground making the loudest thump as he bounced on the ground. So this other ancient looking spectator quickly runs to this mans help and lifts him up but to no avail as this drunk man just drops again. So the old guy leaves and the drunk man gets up on his own, only to immediately fall AGAIN but off a good 3 foot ledge onto some rock solid dirt! this time i swore he broke a bone. and to make it worse, someone else who was in the vicinity sprints up to this guy after his hardest fall and starts chewing this guy out hard core!! Yelling "BU XING!!!" repeatedly and telling this guy he needs to leave. And all the while I'm trying my hardest to maintain eye contact with this lady and pretend like I'm unaware of what's going on. But I failed at last and had to watch this mess go down. We didn't end up getting the womans phone number as you could probably imagine....

We got interviewed by this team from China Airlines curious about we would come to Taiwan, hoping to make their advertising better. Which was cool, given it was our third interview which is pretty uncommon i guess.. People just love us here. But the cool part was one of the guys in the group was the first person I have met here in Taiwan who has been to Saint George and Zion and is not a member of the church!! I was so blown away! He laughed at my speechless face i was so excited i couldn't speak haha. That was cool.

our China Airlines crew!

We tried the pick up basketball game tactic where you make the kids promise to sit and listen to you if you win them. We lost. I'm still not totally cool with that. haha

Last of all and most sad of all, we had to say goodbye to our Taiwanese buddy David Liu who going into the MTC this week and headed out for San Francisco. So we ate with his family one last time last night and it was soooooo good!!! they make Chinese food but almost somewhat American style. It is to die for. I love that family so much! They were also the ones who made us Kottbular (swedish meatballs) for Thanksgiving. Oh so good!

Our man David, off to SFO.  I'm only super jealous of him :-)

Thats my week there for you! Life is amazing. Family, go spend a few days in Zions for me and send me pictures. I'm missing the outdoors hard core haha. But high rise city life is also still pretty rad.

Love you all!

made it to heaven for a day!!

winter in Taiwan actually is a real thing as it turns out....

This picture doesn't do this temple justice.  It's huge!!

my study quarters 

look closely, I'm not half as fat as this picture makes me look bahahahaha

ChongXin de KaiShi

Well, off to a good start of 2015. Had another baptism which was fun. Elder Willes and I were just lucky I guess to find these two ladies and teach them all the way into the font together. Cool stuff. She is my Taiwanese mother I tell her. Our fridge legitimately has no room whatsoever for anything because LaiJM brings us three bags of fruit every other morning and drops it off at our apartment building. I love it :-)

best start to 2015

We also got taken out again by our crazy member friend this week to the most expensive and most delicious barbeque place in ZhongLi. It was 7 course. And all to die for. Life is good hahah. Asian style barbeque is the single greatest thing about Taiwan and life really. I'm going to miss that pretty bad I won't lie.

our crazy member friend who loves to take us to the wolfgang puck's of taiwan!!

Yesterday we got to go look around the inside of a huge Chinese temple in the middle of no where. That was fun. Although I had a lasting head ache from the friggin incense burning. But it was still fun to go look around and get a tour from this random guy that was standing outside the temple.

forgot its name sorry, inside was pretty cool though!

We have a friend from Turkey we get to see every once in a while. We took us to Japanese last, and that is where I ate the grossest thing of this week, raw shrimp. I can handle anything raw, including beef. But shrimp for some reason not my thing.. I do not recommend it.

our man Ekrem from Turkey

I got to play DaTongBan (senior comp) for a day when Elder Heaps came out to Zhongli with me for a night. It was great. Learned a lot. Including the fact that I never want to train. Nor be senior companion. It is such a headache having to handle everything.

This week was probably the biggest example of where I truly experienced just how exhausting a mission is, I think I was definitely sick, because I was helpless bahahaha good thing God has my back I guess. I looked back through my journal and noticed that everyday I included somewhere in there that "I can hardly keep my eyes open right now" haha mission life for you..

Not much else to report other than dinner last night was Kottbular!!! Miracles do happen.

All my love from Taiwan,

out preaching to the world.

there really is dirt in Taiwan, weird.

Taiwan's night time skies

Also Taiwan has one thug missionary loose on the streets.  Watch out!