November 24, 2014

While you are all eating turkey, I shall order chicken (because you can order everything in Korea) and probably buy a cake. Turkey is not a thing in Korea, unless you go to Costco, and it's probably expensive :P And tasteless. I also did see a pumpkin pie there... it was tempting, but I was fairly certain it would NOT taste as good as Dad's, so I didn't bother getting it :P Ah. I would feel sad about missing Thanksgiving and stuffing myself and all that, but I usually eat a huge amount of food every week anyways, so it's not like my stomach is missing out on anything :P

That one time we got a lot of fruit, 'cuz people love us

Anyways :P This past week has been pretty good. We had a meeting with all the zone and sister training leaders, and we are trying to set in motion some new things in Korea with social media and the internet. The idea is that (at least in Korean) a lot of the time, when people search our church online, they find bad stuff about it, which if you track, it comes from just THREE people! What the what. So they want to kind of change that, and have actual church websites come up instead. So we want to get the members more involved in online sharing of church stuff and the like. That way also, if their friends see those videos or pictures, they might have interest in learning more. It's cool stuff.

We are hoping to try to have a fireside sometime next year to show members how they can use the internet for good, and also maybe have a new calling in the ward to encourage stuff. We'll see how it goes :) 

Makeshift cupcake tins, because these things don't exist in Korea

Making cupcakes my parents sent me for my birthday

Yeah for cupcakes!

Oh. So we met that one investigator for the last time. She decided that she likes English more than the Book of Mormon, haha. She's busy, so she chose to go to English class over meeting with us more for just Gospel. I hope that one day she will be interested enough again to learn more, but I at least feel good that we tried our best and she has a good foundation in the important things we teach. She came to English class on Saturday, so I hope she continues to come :)

We met with a member who basically lives in a marble castle! It was crazy how nice her HOUSE (not apartment, which basically everyone lives in) is. Living in Korea is SOOO expensive, so I don't even want to think about how expensive that house was. She had several chandeliers and a maid. But the food was good :P Haha. She also gave Sis Hingano a lot of socks because the ones she had had holes in them. And then later bought her some stockings :P And she gave us a lot of persimmon, which is really common in Korea, by the way. I had never even seen it in America.

We tried to find a member's apartment the other day. It was a bit of an adventure. We weren't sure exactly how to get there when we got on the bus, but we got out at the right stop (by guessing) and even found it! BUT, they moved... we had the wrong address. But we had fun visiting a sketchy apartment. :P It was good exercise, I guess. And very educational.. :P 

Our apartment it tiny!

Yup, that is the entire kitchen

Remember that one eccentric member we meet with a lot from Gwangan? We have been so busy the past few weeks that we haven't met, which is kind of a shame. She's so funny to listen to. But we thought we had an appointment with her this week, but what ended up happening was she took us to a restaurant, paid for the 4 of us, and then left. :P Well. That didn't go as planned. Haha. 

Anyways. Earlier this week we got a random call from someone who didn't tell us her name, but asked us if we knew someone (who we did, she's a member in Haeundae and is in Seoul right now on a mission), and then said she wanted to eat with us. Sooooo, we did. Haha. We didn't know what to expect from that appointment. It turns out it was her parents! They aren't members, and from the conversation we had with them, they really don't know ANYTHING about our church. They didn't know that all missionaries serve for 18 months (or 2yrs), and why their daughter doesn't call, just emails. It was interesting. They were SUUUPER nice though. They took us to a well known restaurant (it sells Gamjatang?? which is pork spine soup. sooo good), and it was soooooo good. They were really happy with the amount we ate and kept commenting on how well we eat. And afterwards, they insisted on buying us fruit, so we got a huge bag of apples and persimmon. They tried to buy more, but we insisted we were fine :P We hope to meet with them again. 

As far as spiritual things go, I read this suuuper good talk that Sis Hingano gave me. It was really long but I really liked it. I'll probably email you about it some other time, but it was basically about how it is important that the desires of our hearts are right, and that we are continually changing and learning. One interesting point was that even if we DO good things, if our hearts aren't in the right place, it doesn't profit us anything. We don't BECOME better if we don't want to do the good things we are doing... if that makes sense.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!