It was nice to see you (sort of, you should try and get a better webcam, that one was exceedingly blurry). Tell Robin I'm sorry I forgot to send her her birthday card, I'll get that into the mail hopefully some time today or tomorrow. Now she's date-able, have dad buy a shotgun, sit on the front steps polishing it when her first date comes up to pick her up. It'll work better now that he's got some facial hair.
If I never told you the end story with Xxxx (the 82 year old man who gave us tea and offered us beer), we had to drop him, he just wanted someone to talk to, no real interest in religion at all. Problem was that he doesn't speak much Mandarin or English, mostly just Cantonese, so it took about 4 lessons to figure that out.
Transfers are coming up in a week, and with it comes the end of my training! I might get transferred somewhere in Chinatown (get a new companion and/or change up what investigators I'm meeting with), but other than that, not much will probably change. We've been told by our zone leaders we are getting 2 new missionaries, 1 Elder, 1 Sister. Problem with that theory is that Elder Williams is already training that new Elder who was supposed to come out, and he's training him in upstate. He called us to let us know he had ordered a Chinese hymnbook for him, but had put the address as 221E Broadway, so he needed us to send it with the office Elders. So that new Elder may or may not be coming to Chinatown at some point. As for the Sister, Sister Khong and Sister Chen both went to BYU Hawaii and knew her there, and they both confirmed that her mission call was English speaking, not Mandarin, even though she was from ...I think Taiwan. Basically we've just proved that the MTC doesn't do too good of a job at keeping track of what languages people already speak and what languages they are supposed to speak. (Elder Mok spent 12 weeks in the MTC to learn a language that he had been fluent in since he was 4 years old.) To sum up, the odds of me training this next cycle aren't very likely.
Stake conference was fun, a decent number of the ward showed up to the Sunday session, only about 3 to the saturday adult session though. The evening session was translated via elder Mok (the man is a translation machine, he can switch between English, Cantonese, and Mandarin so easy it's ridiculous, it's also funny because some sayings in English don't translate into Chinese, and vice versa, but he still says them because he's thinking that language at the time, and it confuses native speakers. For example, saying "sweet" as a similar meaning to cool/okay in Chinese doesn't work at all, it just messes with their heads.) The Sunday session was translated already, because it was actually a regional conference broadcast from SLC, so we got to watch L. Tom Perry and Boyd K. Packer talk. The APs told us all that the conference was all supposed to be about missionary work, but instead it was all about temples. whoops.
We have a lesson scheduled with Xxx. He's a student at CUNY (City University of New York), getting his PhD in Linguistics, got a bachelors in Statistics and a masters in Business.
We decided to go to the Bronx Zoo finally, despite the warning of thunderstorms, because the weather has been saying storms for the last 3 days and it's been blue skies. Got up this morning and we couldn't see Freedom Tower because of the fog/clouds. Well played Irony, well played. (It hasn't started raining yet, but we have proved that the sky can open up in about 3 seconds flat if it so desires. And it probably will.) it's supposed to be 85 degrees though, so we'll only get soaked, and not cold.
Love you all, drunk people can be really funny to talk to/watch,
Your relative in service,
Elder Christensen version Rong(2)Yao(4)Ban(1) de(5) Fei(2)Pang(4) -(literally means glorious (as an attribute describing Sub.) Fat. The "fat" is fancier though, so it's more like "Rotund", but without the implication of round, just the way it sounds more fancy than saying fat.)
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Final side note, if you look on LDS.org, you'll see a picture of 2 missionaries talking to someone in a big city. The one with white skin and brown hair is elder Hutchins, he's my AP, and he goes home a week from today. How's that a nice gift to him for his last week of missionary-ing?
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