Whoooooo'lll Stop the Rain? September 6, 2015

This past week has not been very exciting. It has rained. A lot. I keep having Creedence Clearwater Revival songs stuck in my head lol. This week we switched into more of a finding mode which has been fun! There's this awesome park in our area and the Taiwanese park scene at night is always bumpin' (unless it's raining). There's a large basketball area with like 5 courts and it's way fun to go talk to bros over there about the NBA or their Nike's. So many people have way cool Nike's over here! and the Taiwanese loooove Kobe. I've got some real good numbers from guys over there and hopefully something will happen! We ask people if we can walk with them and they usually say no but some people are way chill and we get a good walk in and share some gospel! There's also a big zumba class that happens a few times a week I've been trying to convince Elder Zhao that we should go join them and contact, but I guess dancing is against the rules lol. This week I've really been trying to improve the effectiveness of my prayers and apply the things stated about prayer in PMG. This has helped me a ton and I love how PMG says that "effective prayer requires GREAT effort". There's a ton of things to pray for every day and it sometimes gets repetitive but I know that the only way we can get blessings is by asking for them!

This is at the trainer follow up meeting! It was way cool to see all my homies from the MTC and get some insight from President and Sister Blickenstaff!

1 Week, 2 P-days! August 28, 2015

Because of an influx of 32 new missionaries, a lot of new areas are opening up and therefore this movecall (transfer) is really weird and I have another P-day! Let's see... What has happened in the last five days........ Hmm... So the other Elders in our district baptized this guy a couple weeks ago and he invited our two companionships to go to a chi dao bao (all you can eat buffet) on the top floor of this way nice mall. This place was incredible. American food, Chinese food, it was all there! Besides main course stuff like steak and duck I had like 4 mangoes, a couple passion fruits, a ton of ice cream, and they had REAL cheesecake! Also, this guy wants to take us there once a month! I'm here in Taiping for at least another month probably 2 so life is good. Mango season is over though which is super sad... :( I guess I will have to continue to expand my fruitual horizons! That'll be way easy because members just give us fruit all the time. :) This week has been super slow as far as the work goes because we've had a lot of activities going on, but next week we're gonna go hard especially cause we don't have p-day! 

Last night we gotta help out with Dan Jones! This is my Dan Jones son Elder Williams from New Zealand who just got here! It was way cool to see where I was just 6 weeks ago and see that I have indeed actually learned some Chinese.

Elder Ah-Fua and my homie from the MTC Elder Spach who just got here a couple days ago. Such tools (in the Lord's hand) :)

This questionable character works at the local 7-11 and by "local 7-11" I mean the one across the street from our apartment, not the 4 others that are a little down the street or the 5 a little bit up the street.

We helped out with some funeral traditions for this lady in our ward. They taught me how to make this sweet lotus flower! 

KFC Man... August 24, 2015

This was a suuuper fast week! Not too much crazy stuff happened. Last P-day we went to this awesome mall right by the mission home. 13 floors of stuff. Everything was American priced so that kinda sucked but I had a really good cheeseburger and we sat in massage chairs for like an hour and that was incredible. I hadn't realized before how stressed my feet were but afterwards it was like I was walking on small clouds! Chinese is wild. Tones are hard, man. For example, one tone is the difference between saying "Endure to the end" and "eat a hand until the end" lol. Every Friday we have weekly planning and the word for "weekly" (meizhou) is the exact same as the word for "american continent" so we always go eat American food after weekly planning. Of all the food that I've eaten here in Taiwan, I think it's funny that the thing that has messed up my bowels more than anything else combined is KFC. I won't go into detail, but it wasn't fun. Besides that, this week was pretty normal. Taught a lot of lessons. Brought the sacrament to our 92 year old investigator! Taiwan continues to amaze me every day and the weather is starting to cool off which is great!

Every Friday for the last month we get to ball with these orphans and some basketball instructors. It was way fun and they're great kids! I think it's hilarious though how a lot of them weren't sure how to pose for a picture! 

Asian graffiti is exactly what you'd expect

One Month in Taiwan August 17, 2015

It's been a little over a month here in Taiwan! I feel like this last week I really started to get really comfortable here. A lot of interesting things happened this week. I ate pig stomach, chicken feet, and stinky tofu which is one of the worst things I've ever eaten which probably means that my Dad would love it lol. I also found this place that has mango milk and it's the greatest thing ever! It's the only place that I can get milk that doesn't suck. I will not become lactose intolerant like some missionaries that go to Asia do! These super old dudes who are investigators invited us over for lunch and I had the best fried rice I've ever had (sorry mom). The guy who cooked it said that we could come back over and he'd teach us how to cook it! The mission is so awesome. Preach My Gospel says that as you gain more experience, your desire to learn and grow will also increase. I feel like my experience finally hit a certain threshold this past week where I really just wanna learn and do stuff to be a better missionary. I organized all my stuff and cleaned as much as I could and this past week I've had the best studies of my life and most of my worries that I had before are gone. It's really the blessings of becoming a better Preach My Gospel missionary, like Elder Bednar says. It's either that or the fact that I bought a ton of stuff at a store last P-day and the total came out to be 777 NT. Quick story: we taught this old Christian minister this week. He was one of the nicest people I've met so far, but we got into a little discussion about the Book of Mormon and how the Bible says you can't add to it. I couldn't say anything in Chinese to refute that, but my companion who is a scripture scholar Bible bashed this guy to the ground talking about Pharisees and the Book of Jasher and all this smart stuff! It was incredible. In the end the minister didn't have much to say, but he said he'd tell his congregations and people that the Mormon's are also good Christians! Life is good.

This is the tree we saved after the typhoon. This is also my "bruh" pose.

This Week I Survived a Typhoon August 9, 2015

This week I survived a typhoon!! It's hard to get any good information about it because we can't look it up online and every person says something different about it, but supposedly it was the worst one in like 60 years! However, Taichung is situated right by some huge mountain that protected it pretty well from the storm. There were a few times during the two-day long ordeal, when the winds got so bad that it uprooted some trees and destroyed a bunch of stuff! Bu​t when the wind wasn't bad we were out in the rain preaching the gospel! There was a point when we were riding to dinner on Saturday and the winds really started to pick up and I thought a tree was gonna fall on me or a branch was gonna fly into me or something, but we were fine and ended up spending the rest of the night in the apartment listening to Johnny Cash sing hymns and catching up on records! In other news, I went on my first exchange this week which was fun and a great learning experience. Lessons weren't as plentiful this week due to the typhoon, but there was a day earlier in the week when we went to Chin Yi University, which is in our area, and we did some great contacting and eventually set up a lesson with this super nice kid named Fun (who we met with yesterday) and we also set up with one of the professors that teaches there! Well, that's about it! I'm off to go get me my first Taiwanese haircut!

Last p-day we went to a hot pot buffet. It was like 12 US dollars which is by far the most I've spent on food here but also definitely the most satisfied and full. Besides hot-pot stuff they had fries, chicken nuggets, popcorn, and ice cream. It was awesome. In this pic is Elder Efros, who I went on exchanges with last week. He pounded like 9 cokes by himself. So impressive.

During the typhoon

The girl we baptized last week is way good at drawing and so she drew this super awesome pic for me!!

Taiwan Taichung Mission -Typhoon Soudelor August 6, 2015

Dear Parents of Taiwan Taichung Missionaries,

As perhaps you are already aware, typhoon Soudelor is expected to hit Taiwan sometime this evening (local time) with high winds and drenching rains lasting at least 24 hours. It is apparently the worst tropical storm so far in 2015. Current weather projections indicate that the hardest hit areas in Taiwan will be the east coast and northern regions. Our mission covers the southern half of Taiwan and does not include any of the east coast. Regardless, we are still expecting and preparing for severe weather.

All missionaries have been notified to “stay close enough to home that they could walk back in case of severe wind or rain.” They are repeatedly counseled not to ride bicycles during high wind and/or rain. All missionaries have 72-hour kits that were recently checked and replenished.

We appreciate your faith and prayers on behalf of our missionaries and all those who will be affected by this storm.

Warm regards,

President Blickenstaff

Taiwan Taichung Mission

Greetings Again From Taiping August 2, 2015

Don't have a ton of time to write today cause there's a lot of stuff we need to do, but the past week has been pretty eventful! This is definitely the hardest I've worked in my life and it's super tiring but also great at the same time!

Look what I found :)

My first baptism! this is Sister Hong, she's been investigating the church for like 2 years and 

I had basically nothing to do with her conversion but it was still a great day and event!

The District. Got tepenyaki for only 110 quai (like $4)!!

Last P-day it rained buckets, just like me and my friend Elder Ah-Fua do when we ball up orphans. Literally, we had an activity this week where a bunch of orphans came to our church to play basketball it was way fun and some of them were actually pretty dang good!