Ni hao! Another week in Taiwan has come and gone. It feels like I have been here forever sometimes and sometimes it seems like I just got here. I have had some of the best and worst moments in my life since I have been here honestly. Everyday I get a little more used to the life of a missionary and I am honestly still learning and adjusting. I am glad to be here and I am loving it. Today for P-Day we are meeting up with some Elders including Elder Dorious from Bountiful and going to a Trampoline park! I am so pumped haha its my first fun Pday activity!!!
My desk in my apartment
We have been doing a lot of knocking and street finding here to try to find more investigators. We have 2 with a baptismal date right now and need to get new people to teach! It is so hard sometimes and sometimes its really fun haha! I don’t know if I have mentioned it but there are so many dogs here in Taiwan its not even funny. Every street we go down has a bunch of dogs who bark at us. My companion and I have to use our umbrella’s to ward them off haha! We have gotten like 4 referrals from ward members but them have all been out of our area so we have had to send them off to other missionaries:( It was kind of frustrating haha but I know we just have to keep working and we will find prepared people.
Wednesday night we teach our free English class! It is always a great experience and its a blast teaching the people here. I teach the advanced class so I can speak all English. Everyone in my class has very good English honestly. Our class has about 10 people who regularly come. I feel like I can help like 6-7 of them and the other 2-3 I can’t really do anything for haha. Dad I had a funny experience with one person in my English class that made me think of you haha! His English name is “Barry” and he’s the funniest guy. I would say he’s in his early 60’s. He just sits there with a single piece of paper taking notes and then when we break out into groups to answer questions he will raise his hand and just say the most obscure vocab words ever. The other night he just tapped me and just said “ambiance”, nothing else haha. Other words he has said to me are “nostalgia” and “antique”. He doesn’t use them in a sentence haha! His English is really good though! One guy started talking about the infrastructure of the economy in this weeks class and I was at a loss for words.
The language is coming. I can understand far more than I can speak. The hardest thing is the pronunciation and the tones. I can just feel the American accent coming out of my mouth when I speak haha! We have a language program with phases A B and C. They have it set up so you end up working on all three phases at the same time. A is the main one and its your teaching skills. It has 81 I can…. statements or tasks I think and the last one is like translate a general conference talk into Chinese live haha. Once you get to A29 you can get book B. Getting to A29 is being able to teach the first 5 lessons pretty much so that is my goal for the end of this transfer. Book B is like 6000+ of the most common conversational words and Book C is all the most common characters.
Emily & Jobon Wu ( sister and brother) members of the ward in Longtan Ward
One of our investigators is a Chen family with a mom a dad, 6 yr old girl, and 12yr old boy. They are awesome! They fed us dinner on Thursday this week. The husband taught me how to use chopsticks. I also tried stinky tofu. I was able to keep a straight face but it was one of the worst things I have ever eaten. The smell was awful!!! I have heard it is an acquired taste though. The members gave us a huge bag of you zi which is like the distant cousin of the grapefruit. They are very good! A guy in our ward also gave us mini Japanese swords. The ward here is awesome! I love them!
That’s all for this week I am loving it here! I love reading the Book of Mormon everyday and learning from it! I am so excited to keep sharing this message with the people of Taiwan!
Elder Carlson
Elder Nate Carlson 