Taiwan

Hi Everyone,   It's been another awesome week in Ping Dong! The temperature is still the warmest and nicest on the island so I'm ok with that! We had a pretty busy week with exchanges and going to visit other missionary's district meetings, so this week we traveled quite a bit. This week I went over to a place called Chao Zhou with and Elder Cook. We had a good time and went and visited a new member that was baptized a few months ago. As soon as we stepped in the door, the first thing he did was offer us tea and alcohol! I wonder how well he was taught.... haha. We worked with him to resolve those misunderstandings and it was a good lesson.    On last Monday night, we had a little activity at the church with some members and our friend H.... He's a really awesome guy in the Air Force! He's been investigating the church for a while now and hasn't really felt that this message is true. He says he hopes that what we are sharing with him is true, but he can

Dear Everyone, First I want to start off by saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALEXA!! I can't believe that it's been a whole year since you got your driving license and haven't even crashed the car yet! Congrats! :)   Well my first week in Ping Dong has been pretty fun! It's a lot different moving from an area with almost no one on the streets, to the middle of a fairly large city. If I didn't have someone to lead me around all the time, I would get completely lost within 5 minutes! It's a fun place though!   This past week was our Power Week which means we only have one hour of studies and then leave the house at 9am and then have 15 minutes for lunch and dinner. It was a pretty crazy and interesting week having to come into a new area on a week like that, and also trying to learn everything for what to do to help the new zone out. It's been pretty fun working with Elder Lin. He's from Taipei and has already finished college. He's a pretty funny g

Hi Everyone,    Well my time of serving in Xihu has come to a close and I was transferred today. I've been moved down to the farthest south of Taiwan to a place called Ping Dong. It seems really pretty down here and it's a lot more populated because we are in the middle of Ping Dong city. My new companion is an Elder Lin. He is Taiwanese and seems to be really cool. He was actually my old companion Elder Williams companion right before I went into Xihu, so he served in Xihu for about 6 months. We are the Zone Leaders down here so that should be pretty fun. I'm looking forward to doing what I can to help out down here.    Last week's Chinese New Year was a lot of fun though. We were lucky and had meal appointments for lunch and dinner on every day for the entire week! So we ate pretty well last week. In Taiwan they don't really do anything in regards to traditional stuff for New Years, but they just eat a bunch. Everyone gets together and goes back to their

Dear Everyone,   Well, everyone has been talking a lot about the earthquake that we just had in Taiwan, but Elder Cole and I actually had no idea that it was as bad as everyone said it was. We feel earthquakes all the time here in Taiwan so we had no clue that this was anything bigger than usual. We woke up in the night and turned to my companion and said "oh..an earthquake." and then just went back to bed. The rocking was actually pretty comfortable haha. We only live on the 4th floor so it wasn't too bad for us. The next day everyone was talking about how bad it was and I guess it was pretty severe. Several people died in the collapse buildings and there are around 100 or so people that they haven't found yet. I don't think that they will be calling us missionaries to do any help. At least up here in Xihu. While riding around, we didn't see any real damage, just a couple of big trees that had fallen over. No aftershocks either. So it's all good here