This has been a rather slow week. Tuesday was 10/10, which is a holiday here, so everyone got a four-day weekend and left Daya. Then it rained the second half of the week. Taiwanese people fear the rain. They all drive scooters, so their fear is understandable. I don't particularly enjoy being soaking wet either.  However, it also meant that no one ventured out of their house for three days, so we spent the week wandering through a strange ghost town. Even the 7-11s were empty!

I've spent a large portion of the week panicking over language learning. In training, we have a language study plan called phase one where we have to learn all the language necessary to teach the missionary lessons. Phase one is a good thing, but it's also evil and everyone hates it because the words we learn are pulled straight from the Preach My Gospel Chinese translation, and a large quantity are really weird, or only really used in written language. After we learn the words for each lesson, we are tested by our trainers, then we have to teach the lesson to our District Leader. It's slightly stressful. I'm almost done, but the lesson I'm currently working on is the commandments, which has an insane amount of vocab. I'm pretty sure I can say abundant about 4 different ways now. I know I'll be glad to have studied all this when I'm done, but right now it's awful. 

The area we share a chapel with, Tanzi, had a baptism yesterday. It was the bishop's daughter's boyfriend. Tanzi is cool, because church starts at 1:30, so whenever they have a baptism, they hold it right before sacrament and pretty much the whole ward attends. It's really neat to see the whole ward rally around the new member that way, and welcome them in. 

Happiest news of the week- we found a legit zhua bing stand on a road near the church! Zhua bing translates to 'green onion pancake', but that doesn't do it nearly enough justice. Instead of a thick, spongey consistency, zhua bings are made of a flakey, fluffy pastry that is drenched in oil and cooked to crispy amazingness on a grill. Then the lady adds a bunch of sauce, an egg, bacon, and cheese, and wraps it up into an incredible, greasy, savory sandwich. Life is good. 

That's about all that's happened this week. Hope you all have an amazing day today!

Love,

Sister Hull

Pics:

1: I discovered this week that if you lean off our 11th story balcony and crane your neck weird, we have a gorgeous view out the back of our apartment. Taiwan really is an amazingly beautiful country.

2: When Sister Smith and I aren't eating out, we survive mainly off of this Indonesian brand of ramen that's actually seriously incredible. We've eaten it so much, I felt like it deserved mention.

3: For P-day, we convinced the elders to do face masks with us while we watched the church's addiction recovery videos. They're really quite good. The Tanzi elders came up while we were doing this, and asked us which banks we'd robbed today.

4: Rain days mean rain clothes. This poncho was originally purchased for my trip to China in 2014. It has served me well ever since.

5: This is me attempting to study phase one yesterday. On Sundays we have a solid 3.5 hour block of studies with language study at the very end, and it's quite an endurance event to get through.

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