Although the Chinatown ward does take a bus to HCP every summer, and some mission presidents have in the past allowed missionaries to go to help translate, President Morgan stated in no uncertain terms that that would not be happening, so I guess I won't get to come see the Hill Cumorah Pageant this year. It was a long shot anyway.
President's goal is for every companionship to have 21 lessons a week, and 1 baptism a month, so 5 isn't actually a very large number at all. I will state right now though that such an event has not occurred in Chinatown (in terms of that number of lessons) in probably years, if not ever. We have had that rate of baptisms before, but right now, its going pretty slow, partially because the missionaries are working on getting the ward to be able to stand on its own (teaching people how to fill callings, trying to put together a ward directory/list of less active members.) Also, if we had that number of baptisms sustained throughout the year, given our number of missionaries, we would have 84 baptisms in 1 year in the 1 ward. Currently we have 3 for 2013, and not too many people are unhappy with that, because it means we get to work on hunting down all the million baptisms we've had before that vanished, and getting them to come back/getting the men to attend/learn enough that we can give them the priesthood.
Tell Cam that I'm sure he'll do great on the Oboe and Sax (when he gets there). As for Chinese, make sure he practices tones and pronunciation a lot. The smallest difference in either can completely change what you are trying to say.
Point of clarification, most of my emails will not be as long as my previous one, we went to the LDS services building on 14th street to email (so Williams could send pictures), and there is no time limit there, so I spent about 80 or 90 minutes on that email. Most of the time I'll be limited to somewhere closer to an hour.
Yes, we do go tracting/contacting in the snow (the boots are nice). Tracting is hard because so many of the buildings have an outside door that is locked before you can even get to the apartment doors, so it's really hard to get inside to even start knocking, basically we just walk the streets till we see a door that didn't close all the way, or loiter while someone opens it, then grab it before it closes all the way. We've only had one good contact from tracting thus far, his name is XXXX XXX Hong, he's a 70+ cantonese man who speaks decent English. Basically he's just super lonely at night because his wife is off gambling in Jersey from 2 to 10 every day, so he invited us in, offered us a drink (he doesn't realize that you can't offer alcohol to minors. We declined.) So he gave us tea instead. Apparently Chrysanthemum Tea is allowed for missionaries to drink according to everyone. I hated it. It tasted okay, but it gave me the biggest headache ever, so if he offers again (we're going back tonight), I think I'll decline.
The language is hard. We mostly speak English at the apartment, that is something we are working on. My biggest problem is working on trying to understand people's accents, once I can get that down, I'll start to get a grip again on what vocab I need to practice, because right now I'm just struggling to follow what's being said. It is slowly coming though, so you can rest easy there. A lot of the people we talk to have at least a little English too.
As for adjusting to missionary life, I still have yet to have a moment of "Holy crap, I'm on a mission", and I'm starting to think it may never occur, I've already adjusted to this life pretty well overall. Maybe when I get transferred upstate I'll get that moment, because it will be more like a standard missionary experience. As for noise, I personally don't find it that loud. The subway, yes, but when we are out tracting/contacting, I don't even notice the noise, it just seems natural given the number of people. Plus, it actually is pretty quiet in our neighborhood come night when we go to bed. The loudest it ever got at night was one time when some street racers drove down East Broadway blasting music and the cops were trying to chase them down.
We got to go to the temple for a Mandarin session on Saturday. Really different/strange. I understood enough that when combining it with how well I knew the English version, I never got lost, but there were some points where I had no clue what words they were saying.
As for things I could use, I think a backpack would be good. Basically no one here has a shoulder bag, and it isn't big enough to carry the full set of both English and Chinese everything that I need. One or the other, yes, but not both. Also, if you could go online, find me a Chinese (make sure Mandarin, not Cantonese) hymn book with Pinying (the phonetics) in it, that would be super helpful. My book is somewhat workable, but only characters is a bit troublesome.
Love you all, and given the number of calories you recently sent me, I'm going to get fat,
Elder Christensen
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