Happy Easter!

Happy Easter!! 

  It sounds like everyone had some good parties in the States and in Japan! I remember all those Easter parties at the house. Man they were hectic, but there was always a lot of candy. Even though I never ate a ton of the candy, I still appreciated eating some good chocolate! I've gotten pretty bad about eating lots of sweets over here haha. There are lots of cool sweets to try here, and since I won't be here long, I'm taking advantage of it. I love going to hot pots because they always have unlimited free ice cream. We go to hot pots at least once a week. Oh and an awesome surprise...I found some Tim Tams at the Costco recently so I've been enjoying those with my milk every evening. I'm really glad that you introduced those to us Eric. They don't really have them here in Taiwan much, and they're like 10 bucks for a box, but they're pretty good. 

  This week was pretty special because we got to help people with some service activities! Yes! Everyone here in Taiwan is super unwilling to let anyone help them with anything. They sometimes take it as an insult if people offer to help because they want to be capable of doing things themselves. I've learned that even if a really old person is struggling to pull a massive cart piled high with heavy stuff uphill...don't offer to help. They get upset at you. But luckily we had two chances for service this week! We had planned on Wednesday to go over to a member's house and we thought that we were going to be teaching one of their friends. But when we showed up at the house, everyone was busy cleaning, and they instantly just shoved mops and cleaning supplies at us and we just got to work. We literally had barely cleaned for an hour when they made us stop. They said we were working too hard. We hadn't really done much though haha. It's either we really work a lot harder than them, or they think that white Americans are soft and can't work for long. I'm pretty sure it's not the first one though....I guess they think we're soft.  

  Easter was Sunday but in Taiwan it was also Grave Sweeping Day! So last Saturday we got to go to a big cemetery and help them sweep, weed, and take care of some of the graves. It was a lot of fun, but it was really hot and I got pretty sunburned. It was especially fun though because a lot of the Taichung area missionaries were there and I got to work and talk with a bunch of my old buddies. 

 

  Also, X...X... and Ama had their baptismal service!! Yeah! Ama had to have 4 people help here be baptized in the font! Luckily everything went well. Apparently there were a ton of people who came to the service. That would have been a neat baptism to attend. I'm glad that they are doing well though! 

  Monday night we had a fun activity. We went with a bunch of people to go shrimp fishing! For those of you who don't know, shrimp fishing is just like normal fishing with a pole and hook and bait, but you get to fish for huge shrimp! Some were as big as my hand! They don't have any coastline places that are good for it so we went to a big warehouse and inside they had a giant pool where they would just toss the shrimp in and we would fish them out. It sounds like it would be really easy to just reel them in all day, but don't be deceived. It's really hard! I sat there for an hour and a half and didn't get a single bite. What's worse was that there was a ton of pro fishers next to me and they pulled up a shrimp like every 30 seconds! There wasn't any left for me! They must of had really good bait or something. Luckily right when I was about to give up (Literally, I just yanked out my pole in frustration for the last time) I pulled out a decent sized shrimp!! Afterwards some other people had caught a bunch of shrimp and we all cooked them up and ate them. They were pretty good and pretty big! Well, I don't have a ton of pictures to send this week, but there should be some on the mission blog soon of the grave sweeping and then hopefully I'll get some of the baptism and of more shrimp fishing! 

  I'm really looking forward to relaxing and watching so conference this weekend. Thanks for all the recommended talks. I will pay special attention to those. Well, I love you all very much! Have a great week!

Love 

Andrew

ps btw if you have't checked out the church's new video for easter, I really recommend it. #becausehelives

 

Shrimp Fishing