Sunday, September 1, 2013

ELDER HYRUM RICHARDSON LETTER #11



WEEKLY LETTER #11 FROM ELDER HYRUM RICHARDSON
JULY 28, 2013
Pictures below letter
So I think last week I was still in kind of a blur.  I didn't really know what was going on, and I still felt like I was fresh out of the MTC. So this is my REAL first letter about my first experience in Taiwan!

This is my area!! This is called DaHu Lake, and this is the view from the road that we ride around to get to the other part of the city. We have such a beautiful area!

Last week, about right after we wrote emails, they delivered my bike! It's a really nice looking bike, and it's too bad that I'll be painting and scratching it up soon! I love riding my bike, but so far I'm not a fan of riding on the roads of Taibei. It wouldn't be bad, except for the buses. It's rather scary when a giant city bus passes you at 30 mph so close that you could touch it, and there's nothing worse than peeking behind and seeing just the front of a bus right on your tail. There is a bike lane...kind of. The problem is that the bike lane is also the bus stop lane and is also the car parking lane, so it's never just the bikes there. Sometimes the buses will speed past and cut us off to get to the stop, and then we have to go around it out into traffic! My companion also tends to just start going until we reach the destination or a stop light. I've already lost him once! He's not afraid of the buses; he says they're like whales in the streets, big and non-threatening. But to me they still feel like charging elephants! Don't worry Mom, haven't had any super close calls yet! They're all actually pretty good drivers (there's more scooters than cars too), it just stresses me out right now! I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually.

We've run into quite a few people who speak English pretty well. It's a big deal here in Taibei. All of the public signs and a lot of other things are in both Chinese and English. A couple of investigators have good English, so it's certainly helpful for me when I get caught up on Chinese. They are very good about helping me out and trying to understand, which I really appreciate. We teach and English class every Wednesday evening, and I teach the advanced level, so most of the time I just speak English and they understand. We talk about more complicated vocab words, and this week we're going to talk about some American idioms. I'm super excited!
Chinese is coming better than it was last week. It's nice to go to church meetings and have three hours of listening practice. People still talk too fast, but I'm starting to understand them. It still depends on the person who is talking. If they have really clear Chinese, then I can at least get all the words that I know (which isn't that much), but if they have mumbly Chinese (which a lot of people do), then I pretty much get nothing! ;) I'm still working on it, and I know the Lord will bless me if I just keep working hard to receive the gift of tongues. It was funny; we went to a member's house with the senior missionaries on Saturday. We had 3.5 people who were bilingual with Chinese and English (I'm the half), one who was only English, and one who was only Chinese. So in the course of about 5 minutes we switched languages at least ten times! I thought it was pretty entertaining.

Our investigators are SOO busy! It's so hard to get the chance to meet with them, because most of them just work all the time! It's part of the Taiwanese culture that you need to work hard, but I think a lot of people take it too far and work is the only thing that they do in life. It's frustrating for us missionaries because we know they could be so much more fulfilled in life, but they won't take the time to meet with us because they just work so hard! One of our investigators, Ryan, is ready to be baptized. He's had all the lessons, he believes it is true, but he just doesn't have the time to get a baptismal interview. He works two jobs and his schedule is always super uncertain, so it's really hard to get in contact with him. Yesterday, we had him and an investigator family all set up to come to church, and were very sad when they didn't show up...but then out of the blue and old investigator apparently from months ago showed up at church! It was definitely a miracle and comforting to me personally. That's one thing we're working through this week. We're also excited to have first lessons with four new investigators this week, some of them that I helped contact!

The food is really as good as I expected. We eat lunch and dinner in the little shops on the side of the road, and the food there is always delicious and super cheap. We've been fortunate over the past 3 days to have been fed 5 times by members, which is apparently more than my companion had his first two transfers here! (A "transfer" is 6 weeks) Here's a fun word. The word for puff in Chinese (as in creme puff) is pao4 fu2, which is really fun to say. We had a recent convert who took us to a 吃到飽 chi1 dao4 bao4 - eat arrive full so all you can eat!), and we ate SO much food. Then there was a soup that they brought out that Chen Baba wanted us to eat, so we all tried some. After we ate it, I was told that it was intestine soup. Then I had the thought that I would soon have intestines in my intestines and it would be intestinception.

Here are some others notes from this week:
-There's a 7-11 on almost every block here. Taiwan has the highest concentration of convenience stores in the world.
-Almost every phone here has waiting music like on hold music for big companies in the States.
-I bought a Chinese chess set!
-It's difficult to find trash cans in Taiwan, I don't know why.
-Our home phone gets a lot of static feedback from the line which plays on the speakerphone sometimes. We say it's a ghost and we call him Alfred.

I'm doing great here in Taiwan! It's a little odd being at such a different time zone, but it's neat to think that I'm halfway around the world!
I love preaching the gospel here! It's cool to be an ambassador of Christ at all times! Thank you for your thoughts and prayers!

田長老
Elder Richardson

P.S. I have a feeling my English is going to regress really fast, so I'd like to apologize in advance.

My bed is the one with the pink blanket and puppy dog pillow

Desk Area

First P-Day adventure to Jiu fen. That's the Pacific Ocean!

Cool building in Jiu fen

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