They are having entirely too much fun over there!
Can you really have too many investigators? No! But it is possible to not have enough time to meet all of them in one week! This last week we ended up finding 10 new investigators and getting tons of contact information for people who are probably willing to meet again, but don’t count as investigators yet since we didn’t set up a specific time to meet.
This upcoming week we have over 20 appointments already scheduled – we’ve pretty much booked every free moment we have during this week because of it. The hardest part is just getting members to come with us to our lessons, since we are supposed to have a peike (member accompanying the lesson) for every lesson we teach. Unfortunately, many of the members just say they’re busy and can’t help, which is frustrating.
Taipei skyline from XiangShan
Last Monday, my companion and I went to this place called XiangShan which is this cool hill that overlooks Taipei City. Since it was fairly warm and humid, and we ran both up and down the hill, we went out with some other missionaries from my last area to eat at this place called King Mango.
Mango ice! Count me in!!!
They make really good mango ice in addition to a bunch of different flavors. It was super nice to have on such a warm day and after hiking so much!
On Wednesday, we had a combined ward conference with some other zones in a place called Taoyuan. It’s about a 45 minute bus ride after about a 10 minute MRT ride from our house.
Uh, Elder in the back…that’s not exactly what “keep your nose clean” means.
This was a special occasion since there was a General Authority coming out to talk with us – Elder Wong. He serves in the Asia Area Presidency and came to Taiwan to meet with all of us missionaries. It was an awesome conference – and went for about 7 hours total. Elder Wong is super funny, so everyone enjoyed it…plus we got Costco pizza for lunch.
Add pizza delivery boy to the resume…
To make it even better, they had too much pizza, so they told us missionaries to take some home at the end. Since no one really took any, my companion and I crammed 4 pizzas into 2 boxes and took them home with us! I had to strap them on my bike to get them from the MRT station back to our house though!
On Friday, we met with this girl from our ward named Alexandra as well as all her friends!
Future missionary…in training!
We all went to this pasta place to eat some lunch and to meet each other. Alexandra has been pretty busy and hasn’t had much of a chance to come to church that often, but she really wants to go on a mission. Apparently her parents aren’t going to be happy about that, but she’s going ahead with making the plans to do so anyways!
The weather is getting warmer and more humid – it’s not super fun to be outside since you get all wet and sticky…like immediately. We end up buying drinks almost every day from this place called Coco’s, which sells all these teas that are super good, plus they have drinks like strawberry milk (I think that’s what it is in English) which are also amazing. We’re probably going to spend all our money just on drinks and ice cream because of the changing weather, but it’s great – we enjoy it!
– Elder Austin Simonson
文長老