July 9, 2013

Where is this rain of which you speak? It hasn't rained at all here since you started driving out. Still super humid though.

Congratulations to Dad on successfully getting yet another cool part, to Wes on getting a specific part, but one which he has already had, and the rest of you for getting decent random parts. I noticed that Wes had a very appropriate beard in his pictures, but I guess the wig didn't match his natural beard color.

We had a missionary coordination meeting a few weeks back in Bishop McConkie's work office, which also happens to be President Buckner's work office, that's probably where he saw me.

Chinatown is becoming very different from how it was when I got here. Elder Cook is the new district leader AND training Elder Radford, who comes out next week. Elder Foley is the new AP, so he is leaving Chinatown for probably the last time of his mission (he goes home in December). Elder Blonquist is the new Zone Leader companion for Elder Mok, and a new Sister today being trained by Sister Lee makes up for the fact that Sister Chan and Sister Chen have received a transfer to..........SALT LAKE CITY TEMPLE SQUARE VISITOR CENTER! They're going to be there for about 3 months, and then come back to New York. I'll send you some pictures of them, and if you want, you can go and try to find them. Speaking of people from my mission who might be coming out to Utah, Xxx (the recent convert I baptized,) is planning on going to General Conference in October. Apparently if you have a Passport that is from outside the North American continent, they have a big bloc of really good seats reserved in the conference center for international visitors, and you don't even need to get a ticket.

Transfers were today. I'm still with Elder Wang, which means he broke my record of sending people upstate after they were my companion. On the positive side, I've finally started to figure out how to take advantage of having a native speaker companion, and now I have at least 1 more cycle to implement these improvements.

I don't know if I ever told you that I am now the proud owner of a fake, probably illegal, 25 dollar Rolex, which was obtained via street vendors who were selling them to the next group of people over for 90 dollars. (They would have been really mad if they could understand what we were saying to the vendors in chinese. That's what you get for being a tourist.)

I'm not sure how they do the translation for Chinese, but the ward has been taking people up to the pageant for some years, so I'm sure they have something figured out (Xxx is planning on going next year, she didn't get involved in the church early enough to schedule herself to go this time.)

I'll make sure to give the Blairs Dad's number, and you can set it up with them.

Love you all, Have fun at the Hill,
Your son/sibling, (and for the duration of Pageant, companion) in service,
Elder Christensen