I had an epiphany (I'm surprised I remember that word) this last week about running. I was looking back over the course of my mission, and I realized that the 2 companionships I have had thus far where we went running on a close-to-0daily basis have been the companionships where I felt the LEAST healthy, and also gained weight, whereas in all other companionships I've either maintained or dropped slightly. This seemed exactly contradictory to what one would expect, until I thought about the mentality of running verses other forms of exercise. In weight lifting/resistance training, you are focusing on how many times you can do the exercise correctly, and while you feel sore afterwards, it is easy to forget that you can actually burn a decent amount of calories depending on what muscle groups you target. Running on the other hand, the whole point is to focus on how far/fast you went. It connects much closer (at least in my head) to energy burned than resistance/sports does, and so it is much easier to say that you can eat a little bit extra. The problem is that running 5 miles is only about 600-700 calories, which is actually a deficit that is very easy to fill if you allow yourself to eat more. In short, I have determined that running will not be my primary cardio exercise of choice after my mission. Sorry Mom. On the plus side, we ran to Madison Square Garden/Penn Station/the General Post Office on our morning run last Saturday.
We had a former Chinatown missionary come this last Sunday. His name was Albert (or Alfred, I forgot) Lee. He served his mission here in 1999-2000. He was the one that was called by the mission president to open the Chinatown Group one year into his mission (he already spoke Mandarin and Cantonese). He told us about that first Sunday where it was him, his companion (the second counselor in the mission presidency), sister Yan (now the relief society president), and 2 investigators. He hasn't been here during a weekend since he left his mission, so this was the first time he has been able to attend here since 2000. Talk about being able to see the fruits of your efforts. We also found out that he was the one who discovered the contacting spots (tree of life, grand street station) that we still use to this day.
Winter is fighting to make it's way into April. We had small snow flurries last night and this morning. It wasn't close to sticking, but it is a bit annoying when the weather keeps bouncing from 20-30 degrees to 50 degrees or so. Spring is going to get here at some point though.
The Blairs say goodbye this coming Monday, they will be driving back out to Sandy, Utah. Their support here has been wonderful, we're going to miss them a lot. Their Homecoming Talks will be on April 27th at 11am at 1295 East 11000 South in Sandy. They would love to see you come. They said take the 106 exit, then drive to 13th east, and hang a right for a few blocks. Or you could just look it up.
We've been making use of our privilege to stay up late teaching recently, but I don't know how much I like the sleeping in part. Sleeping until after 7 makes me feel like I'm being extremely lazy, even if we have permission to do it. It's also difficult when you get people from Hong Kong and Mainland in the online events events together, because Hong Kong uses traditional characters, but mainland uses simplified. End result, they can't read each other's comments sometimes. On the plus side, I get to learn both!
It just hit me that Robin is getting close to the end of her Junior Year of high school. That's weird.
After my mission I would like to have a phone that is enabled to type characters, probably an iPhone for facetiming purposes, some Chinese movies (Battle for Red Cliff is the Chinese version of Lord of the Rings from what I've heard), and a set of stackable bamboo steaming racks. I'm planning on finding out how to cook most of the stuff I've eaten here after my mission, at the very least I could make the Chinese food we always eat on Christmas Eve/New Years (I forget which).
Conducting district meetings is a strange feeling. I'll probably get used to it though, we don't have any new elders coming in until June it looks like, which means Elders Zander, Blonquist, and Murray will all be gone (Elder Murray and Elder Blonquist are the Zone Leaders). Elder Cook still needs to leave Chinatown, so there is a chance of me being a district leader or Zone Leader until the end of my mission, since there are 4 leadership slots that need to be filled (2 Zone Leaders and 2 District Leaders), and there will be me, Elder Cook, Elder Radford, Elder Leung, Elder Atkinson, Elder Wang maybe, he might stay in the English program for the rest of his mission, and the new elder, who won't be getting any leadership probably until late fall/winter at the earliest. I might train, but based on the family trend it's difficult to say. We'll see though, president likes to be a lose cannon with transfers.
I found peanut butter that needs to be refrigerated after opening. East Coast fads.
For future reference, I usually write my emails at the laundromat and immediately after, so it might be more effective if you could all write on Tuesday night, and then respond to anything in my letter on Wednesdays, because there is no guarantee that I will be available after about 1 here to respond to parts of your letters (11 am in Utah).
Love you,
Your son/sibling in service,
Elder Christensen
陳少駒
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