January 21st 2014

That was yesterday. The snow was falling sideways, and I realized that as a result, everyone was pointing their umbrellas into the wind (at my face) which made it difficult to talk to them. Solution? Stand on the other side, facing into the wind. My mission is the first time I have felt so cold that it actually passed numb and went to perfectly imitating a burning feeling on my hands and face. The odd part? I loved every minute of it. It's strange how the gospel makes you happy despite, (or perhaps through) ridiculous circumstances. Also, the boots are especially warm, I've only had to use the wool socks once, the boots alone are that good at keeping my feet warm/dry. Thank you for paying for them Mom.

We have our first online investigator. He's named Xxxx, he lives in Hong Kong, a friend of Elder Leung, but he speaks English only, his mom is Greek, and his Dad is from India. It sounds like some setup for a punch line from Ethan's mission. We taught him on Skype this morning, really cool guy.

I still haven't gone to the temple. We were going to go this week, but because it is going to be closed next week (cleaning I think), [the Mission] President is taking all the missionaries who go home this cycle to the temple today instead of next week. And the week after that is transfer meeting, so we won't be able to go then either, so the soonest I can hope to go now is mid February. Depressing, it's only a half hour travel away, and I won't have gone in about 8 months by the time I do get to go. Yes, I do acknowledge that Ethan wasn't able to go at all on his mission, but he didn't have a temple 30 minutes away either.

All the missionaries in Chinatown have been requested to begin learning Cantonese. We currently have 3 missionaries, 2 from Hong Kong, one from Singapore, who are already fluent in it, and they are slowly teaching the rest of us. It is a terrible language. Mandarin is much easier to pronounce.

We are putting together a New Years (Chinese) celebration, but I currently don't know what will be involved, so I can't say what the activity is, because the sisters are organizing it.

The new blog is something that has been spearheaded by the sister missionaries, the idea actually came from a less active member I believe. It's been pretty effective thus far, we've had almost 1500 views, most in the USA, a few from Canada, and even a couple from China, and the blog has only been up for a couple weeks. We actually were meaning to ask Wes/Dad if they had any ideas for layout or background or any real web page design stuff that could be used for the blog.

Our new bishop, Huang Kai, was baptized around 10 years ago, he is from Fuzhou China, just like most of the people here in Chinatown, but he works for the MTA, not a restaurant like most of the people here. He's really cool, but a little timid sometimes, he loves the people and the gospel though, so he'll do well. His son Greg was the first primary child in our (back then) branch. He and his wife were sealed a few weeks ago too.

It's been a lot warmer here than it currently is,
Love, your son/sibling in service,
Elder Christensen

陳少駒