Taiwan

Hello everyone!  This is Elder Stevens from the nice tropics of GaoXiong, Taiwan. I'm sorry to hear that everyone is super cold back in the Eastern States, but if you are ever cold, just try to think of the nice beach temperatures that I'm enjoying basically every single day over here! :) I have noticed that it's starting to get a little colder in the day, but that's a relief because we don't sweat as much anymore haha. This week has been pretty much the usual. We had fun with some tracting and lots of contacting haha. We also met with one of our English Class students. (English class is the best! Recently, all of our solid investigators are from English Class!!) and he's pretty cool. His name is K.... We called him up one night and tried to set up a time to meet, but he said he was too busy for the next few days, but that he could come to church. Then one night he just randomly showed up at the church while we were making some calls, and we just taught ...

Dear All,   This week pretty much consisted of us traveling from one meeting to another. Literally I don't think that I've ever had this many meetings in one week before haha.   We went down with a friend to a small island called Qi Jin that is next to Gaoxiong. We went down there and rode around looking at the sights. It looks like a really awesome place to go swimming...but we just watched other people swimming haha.   Then we had our zone meeting down in Shi zhong. And to get there, we have to take a train/subway kind of thing. (Chinese is jieyun but I don't really know the English).  It's about an hour or so of travel each way down there!   Next we went to Shi zhong again because we had a trainer follow up meeting. I'm already halfway through training Elder Grisenti!! It seems like I just barely started, and now we are halfway through the time that we are together.   The following day, we didn't have any meetings, and all of our lessons ca...

Dear Everyone,  Well all the miracles that we were waiting to happen... all happened this week!! This past week we met with S..., who was still having lots of concerns about being baptized. He knows that everything we've shared is true, and he really wants to be baptized, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He didn't want to make a commitment with God that he might break in the future. He was especially worried that he might not always be able to come to church. He wanted to wait until he was sure he would never mess up and then he could be baptized. (Which we let him know was actually impossible.) He is a very....firm person when it comes to his opinions, and it seemed like there was no way we could help him out. We met with him again and had one of the most intense lessons I've ever had. We bore strong testimony, and the Spirit was really strong. We told him that we wanted him to write down a plan of how he was going to keep the Sabbath holy. And if an accident ...

嘿!你好!我們這個禮拜過得還不錯! 神一定在回答我的禱告因為這邊的天氣開始沒有那麼熱! 福音是真實的! Translation: Hey!  Hello!  This week we have a nice good!  God answered my prayers because the weather here is not so hot.  The Gospel is true! So it's been a little better going outside and riding around all day. Actually there is a typhoon that is supposed to come today so it's really cool today. I'm going to be bringing my jacket out today. I really hope it doesn't come because we are planing to go to Monkey Mountain and a zoo nearby there. I'm super excited to go there so I hope that the typhoon doesn't ruin our plans!!   This past weekend was a big festival in Taiwan, it was their zhong qiu jie which is the Mid-Autumn Festival! So everyone was making a bunch of moon cakes during the week and we ate a ton of them!! They are super good and tasty.  Our ward had a big barbaque and we cooked up a bunch of good stuff. The Taiwanese style BBQ are a little different than the American ones. We cook...

Dear Everyone, We've had another exciting week! We started out by going to a place called the Lotus Ponds. I had been there once before with Elder Dalmer, but I haven't gone in a while and my companion has never been there before so we decided to go visit there again. It was quite the adventure! I actually didn't remember how to get there at all and it turned out that we used a completely different route than the one that I used last time to get there. Luckily we were able to follow some road signs to finally make our way down there. It was a nice hot day and we were walking around on foot, so by the time we returned home, we were completely drenched with sweat haha. But that's usually how it is every day so I'm used to it now. I usually like to wear my black pants because they hide the sweat that drips down my whole body a lot better. Anyways...we went and visited the whole Lotus Pond area, which is actually pretty big and took a long time to walk around it. I...

 Hi Everyone,  Last week was full of fun adventures.  Well, I guess there were a few fun ones. This past week we spent lots of time just going around and talking with anyone we met and also knocking doors. It was a pretty hot week, and we were super tired but we both felt really strongly that we were following the Spirit when we were trying to find people. Unfortunately, we didn't see any real success this week. Even after a full week of working hard, we got just one person's phone number. It was a little hard on my companion to be working super hard and still come up with nothing. We actually had one guy try to give us 20 cents to get us to go away hahaha. But Elder Grisenti is awesome and realized something critical. As long as we are doing our part, following the Spirit and working hard, we are successful missionaries and should not get discouraged. I actually thought it was kind of funny a guy trying to pay us to leave haha. And it was only 20 cents too ha...

Dear Everyone, Week two of training has been a blast! It has been so much fun working with Elder Grisenti and having lots of new experiences together! Everything that we do, is a brand new adventure, and we have had plenty of them. One of the pictures that I sent is of us eating some mango bing, which is just a bunch of really fine, shaved ice, with sliced mangos, some mango sauce, and some little rubber balls (kind of like the boba stuff), It is super good!  It's one of my favorite desserts in Taiwan. Best of all,,, it's healthy for you! Kind of. So we went and ate that together. We actually ate bing twice this week, but the first place we went was a little different. It didn't have mangos, it just had a ton of random weird stuff that they put in the shaved ice. Most of the stuff did not belong in a dessert. haha. My companion had trouble finishing it. We've been having fun trying out all of the different foods here and it reminds me of when I tried them all for the ...