Week 10: First Week in Taiwan

Hello Family and Friends!

So yeah, I'm in Taiwan. It's a Monday around 1:37 in the afternoon, my time. So that's what? Like midnight your time. Wow. I feel so remoooooved. So here, let me summarize the events of the last couple days really quick.

Brendan with President and Sister Blickenstaff.

So. Woke up Tuesday morning, crack of 5:00 am. I went and got on a bus, then a train, then trax that took me to the airport. Took a plane from SLC to LAX, had a 4 hour lay-over in LA, then went on a 14 hour flight to Taiwan. Yaaaay. 

The flight was ok. I was all by myself and the two girls sitting by me were sleeping most of the time so not much chance for practicing there. We got to Taoyuan airport at 9, got our luggage, etc., then met the Mission President and his wife as well as the assistants to the president. We all took a picture and then hopped on a bus that took us back to the mission home where we crashed. 

The next day, we got up at 6 to go run. Ok, first thing I noticed when I got out on the main road, SO MANY SCOOTERS. I didn't get a chance to take a lot of pictures this week, but next week I'll make sure I get a picture of a good street. If you're super impatient, just go to google maps and look at the street view of basically any major city street in Taiwan. There will most likely be scooters lining the entire road and sidewalk. So nuts. 

Second thing I noticed, Taiwanese people are super active. The track we were running on(this is at 6:15 am, mind you) was super crowded with people of all ages doing exercises, running, or just stretching. It was awesome. There was a track team there working out and everything.  Anyway, we went there and ran a mile. The mission has all their Elders constantly work on improving their mile time. I got 6:52 so I'm going to try to work down to 6:30. Wish me luck! 

We then ran back to the mission home, showered, dressed and had the best breakfast EVER. We had all this fruit, fresh soy milk, dumplings, etc. Let me tell you about the fruit. I had passion fruit. Passion fruit tastes just about the same as passion fruit flavored stuff in America does, just more fresh. That was great. I had dragon fruit which is either white or red inside and outside, it looks kind of like a more leafy pineapple. It tasted like cantaloupe/honey dew but the texture was more like a soft watermelon. It sounds gross but it was super good. I had star fruit. It was ok. It just tasted like tart water. They also had yellow watermelon which was interesting but super good. 

After breakfast, we had orientation until lunch. For lunch we went to a "hot pot" place. Basically, they give you a pot of this broth stuff on a burner and you turn it on and cook all this stuff in it. I had this bowl of veggies and a plate of rolled up ham things. You'd throw them in the hot broth to cook them and then eat them over rice. It was really good! The weirdest thing I ate there was this cube of rice held together with pigs blood. They didn't tell me what it was until after I ate it...but it wasn't bad. I wouldn't choose to eat it, but it wasn't awful. A sister at the other table totally gagged when they told her what it was. After lunch, we had more orientation. 

Then we had dinner at this really good Peking(Beijing) place. We had Peking duck which was AWESOME and all sorts of other tasty things. After that, we had the Dan Jones activity. For those who don't know who Dan Jones is, he was a missionary for the church in the mid 1800s who went to Wales and England to preach. There's a famous picture of him where he's standing on a box in the middle of a town square, holding up a Book of Mormon and preaching to everyone. So that's what we did. We went to a night market in Taizhong(Taichung), stood up on a crate and bore our testimony. That was so scary, but it definitely helped me with the jet lag. I don't know if my mom will post the pictures that she got, but it was pretty cool. 

After we did that, we got paired with an older missionary and went to try and talk to people and give out Book of Mormons. It was cool! I gave out 3. It was really awesome talking with people in Chinese and being understood! It's like I thought this language was made up until now, but now I'm seeing how it actually works with communicating. It's crazy! Everyone we talked to, pretty much, was so nice and I'd be so happy to see some of them get baptized. 

After that activity, we shared experiences from it back at the mission home and then went to sleep. Yay. The next day, we got up early and ran stairs(ugh). I just barely got over being sore from that. After that, we had breakfast again and went to the "meet your trainers" meeting. We saw some footage/pictures from the previous night and President Blickenstaff talked to us for a bit. 

Then we each were handed a red envelope one by one with the name of our trainer in it. I got an elder named Elder Sumsion. He's from Kaysville, UT and he's awesome. Super solid guy. Super hard worker and I think we're going to have a good time and have success together. It's nice that one of us has their head on straight and knows the language well enough to get by(by the way, that isn't me).

 

A photo of the inside of Brendan's apartment.

The front door of Brendan's new apartment.

We went to lunch at a Burger place, then took the train off to my first area which is Yong Kang which is a suburb of Tainan. Woo! We're about 2 hours south of Taizhong. On the train to Yong Kang, we talked about our goals and set expectations which was nice. 

We had 2 lessons scheduled for that night. One was with a guy named Kase. We gave him a tour of the chapel and taught him how to pray. He did a really good job praying. He seems like he's interested for sure. 

The next lesson was with a less active man named Brother Li. His story is kind of sad. He has some mental health issues, so he's kind of depressed a lot of the time. He actually came in while we were giving Kase a tour of the chapel. We stopped now and then to talk about pictures of the savior and Brother Li had some really good insights when we asked him so I could tell he had a good understanding of the church and a strong testimony. Anyway, after Kase left, we had a good lesson with him. We read Alma 32 with him which talks about faith and he expressed that he needs to face his problems and not just shut himself off which was awesome! I'm hoping to see him improve while I'm here. 

The next day, we had a lot of lessons, but 3 out of the 4 cancelled so we went and contacted around a college campus. We then went over to a man's house named Zhang Baba. Baba means father. We call him that because he's older. Like, in his 50s or something. He was such a character. It was hilarious. He was super animated and he'd throw an "ehhhhh?" after a lot of his comments just to add emphasis. I loved it. He's a member, but I don't know how often he comes. He has a 10-year-old son that we want to teach, and Zhang Baba wants him to be baptized and go on a mission, but he knows if he forces it on his son, it won't be  any use. So he wants to wait until his son is ready. What does that mean? I don't know. We'll just have to pray for them. He did refer us to his son's friend's parents and their children so we went and visited them. They said we could come back so that's cool! 

After that, we went and got dinner, then we had a baptism. It was a boy in a part member family that my companion and his previous companion had taught and prepared for baptism. That was really cool to see. The dad wasn't a member so the bishop did the baptism. 

After that, we had a lesson planned that fell through again so we went tracting(knocking on doors) by where our scheduled lesson was supposed to be. We found a man and his wife there that let us in. They were so nice. The man had a friend when he was a kid who was Mormon in Costa Rica or maybe he said he saw missionaries when he visited there. I don't really remember. In any case, he also agreed to have us back so I'm super excited about that! 

After that, we came home and slept(Yes!). The next morning was church. That was kind of a blur, I have to say. I hardly understood anything. I got up and bore my testimony in Sacrament meeting which was kind of nerve-wracking. Everyone said my Chinese was really good for how long I'd been here so that was nice:) We did studies, then had a meeting with the ward mission leader who's awesome, by the way. He had us over for dinner last night. After dinner, we had a FHE activity with what was supposed to be members and non-members, but really only ended up being members. Oh well. After that, the day was over. 

Today, we got up and it was P-Day. That brings us to now. So I guess that wasn't very quick. I'm almost out of time though, so I'll have to tell everyone more next week. Maybe just snippets because there's so much going on all the time, I don't think I'll have enough time any week to say everything that happened. Suffice it to say, I'm here safely doing the Lord's work, I have what seems to be an awesome companion, the food's great, the people are fantastic. People will just talk to you without it being weird at all. It's awesome. My area is busy and I'm going to help people receive the restored gospel! Yaaaay! I love you all and I'll talk to you next week!

Zai Jian!

-Elder Smith