My Chinese Name

1/18/16

 OH! I chose a Chinese name this last week, tell me if you like it. 洪毅宇。Hong Yi Yu. The last one is pretty much impossible to describe how to say it because English doesn't even have that sound. The first one means 'big or expansive', the second means a sort of willpower kinda, and the second is half of the phrase meaning 'cosmos'. Big Will Cosmos. You can just call me Cosmo for short. It was a super long complicated process but it worked out. Dad, I thought it was funny how you wrote me about choosing a Chinese name just about the time I was in the process of choosing it. My chinese teacher in High School gave me a transliteration one, but I think this one is a little bit better. I'm sorry I don't have much time today, we are going to bike up a volcano. I love you all!!!

I'm sorry, I didn't allot my time very well today, and I want to send a lot of pictures, so this will be pretty short... Any cool movies coming out? Music? Someone has got to make a list for me for when I get back. Feel free to send a short note with things to respond too every week if you want, you don't have to send a full letter every week Mom ;) I love the letters though!!! They are so much fun to read! Our zone is getting awesome T-shirts today that I will have to show you, and transfers are this week! I will let you know next week if I have moved out of Beitou or not. Elder Dixon doesn't think I will, but you never know. Anyways, our mission invite is to invite people to baptism on the street. I am really struggling with that for many different reasons, but everyone just quotes the whole "it's inspired of God" thing as if they could just say anything and then put that at the end to make it true. Does that make sense? I know President Jergensen and the Assistants are inspired, and I know that they are just trying to do their best, and maybe I don't fully understand the mission invite, but the way that it sounds sounds not fully in line with Preach My Gospel and what I feel is right. Hope that clears up the situation a little bit, do you have any ideas to help me? I love you all!!!!  --------------------------------------------------------------------

TAIWANESE PINYIN AND GOSPEL 

Ok, starting out with a little explaining. So, you probably know this, but you can't use letters to spell Chinese characters. They use what they call 'pinyin' (or romanization) to write characters so we Americans can attempt to say what they say. Pretty smart, although it didn't work out too well at first. Not many Americans spoke Chinese and not many Chinese spoke... American?... at that time, so you ended up having to kind of make up how to read the romanization until someone tells you that you got it right. Fortunately, China got smart and changed the romanization so it is a lot easier for us to read normally. Unfortunately, Taiwan wants to be different than China and didn't hop on the bandwagon. Example, the letter 'p' in Taiwanese pinyin makes the 'b' sound. Taipei is actually said Tai-Bei. Peitou, Bei-Tou. Keelung somehow is read more like 'G-long' (with long read in a Long Island accent). Kind of confusing, but that is basically it. So we were walking on the street the other day and saw a sign with what we thought was this horrible romanized stuff, and we couldn't figure out what it said for the life of us. After quite a few minutes, we just smacked our heads and died laughing because the sign said 'Singing Club'. In English. Well, at least we thought it was funny.

This last week, I have truly realized how simple the Gospel of Jesus Christ is. It is our purpose as a missionary--to "bring others unto Christ by helping them receive the restored Gospel through faith in Jesus Christ and His Atonement, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end". Wait, that simple? That simple. I have given up on trying to tell people here in Taiwan formulas for greater faith and logic for a better life. My missionary work has gone back to the basics. Pray often. Read the scriptures. Attend Church. Want more faith? Do those three things better. More faith will bring the desire to change and repent. Our repentance leads to a willingness to make and keep covenants with God. Those covenants bring blessings that help us through our daily lives. Those blessings in turn will bring greater faith, and through this process we can become like our Heavenly Father. What an incredible blessing. I have really soaked in the simplicity of the Gospel this past week, and I hope you all will take a moment during the next week to think about it as well. I love you all!!!

Rubber Ducky campaigning. The voting finally ended. It turns out, people literally vote based on how many times they saw the person running for office. No wonder they will do anything to get your attention...

The other is floor six of our apartment. We were about to go down the elevator when the fire alarm went off. Elder Dixon was like, 'no big deal, it happened all the time in my last apartment!' And I'm like, 'That's a fire alarm!' And then we looked down the stairwell and it was pitch-black and there was smoke coming out of it that smelled like electricity. So we did the only thing two 19-year-olds would do and went down the elevator and out to play frisbee for our morning exercise. We saw a few firetrucks and things pass by, but they passed our apartment building so it was fine. Then we were walking back, and the firetrucks finally found the address of our apartment. It was pretty crazy. All good now, but we couldn't get in for an hour or so.

scary snake we almost stepped on while jogging

We saw the chicken head on the way walking home from a baptism in DanShui. 

Only in Taiwan....

awesome lizard

awesome view

I ate the hot pot today and am so full I could throw up

Gotta love the Beitou statue things.

Some brilliant guys (almost certainly drunk) decided to light a huge mound of firecrackers with their burning cigarettes. This was the result of the carnage. We were sitting there in the rain, wondering how on earth they were going to get that huge mound lit while it was pouring rain and cars were driving through the intersection when something started sparking and the drunk guys barely scrambled a few feet away when the whole mound exploded at the same time. It was ear deafening and we got hit by debris like 30 yards away. Apparently it is a common thing to do, although they accidentally dumped them too close to each other.

Random Christmas lights??

random christmas lights

Changes and Parking

1/10/16

One problem with Taiwan is space. There is none of it. There are so many people here and no where to put them. Much of Taiwan is actually too steep to live on, so they can't just spread out like we do in the States. This leads to a few interesting cultural aspects. First off, Taiwanese graves aren't anything like a cemetery. I haven't actually seen the graves up close, but the mountains are actually covered in them. You will have to look up pictures. The mountains are the only places they have for graves. Second is trash. They can't just dump their trash in a big pile, and they don't have room to store it for second-hand sale or anything like that, so they recycle. Everything. McDonalds has like three or four trashcans and I have no idea where to throw away my garbage. Third, under the majority of public parks here are parking lots. They build parking lots under the parks because otherwise a park wouldn't be worth building--it takes up too much space. Fourth, the roads are tiny. There are parked cars and motorscooters on either side of the already tiny roads, so when people want to park they just stop in the middle of the road and turn their flashers on. Somehow, that means, "Hey! I'm gonna park here for just 10 or 20 minutes and block traffic, but it is OK because I have my flashers on!"

Changes in missionary work are here! First of all, they changed exchanges. Usually when we go on exchanges with the Zone Leaders, you just swap companions for a day and then there is a companionship in each area. Now, both missionaries will go and stay in the leaders' area. This last weekend, Elder Dixon and I were able to go to ShiLin (famous for its gigantic night market) on exchanges. All four of us went to a ChiDaoBao ('eat-till-full') and got sick on taro and sesame ice cream, guava, and steak. It was pretty fun having two companionships together, and I learned a lot about being what my mission president calls being "spiritually bold". Awesome topic worth studying. Also, there is less of a focus on less actives and more of a focus on baptizing converts and teaching repentance. I love that! I think we missionaries over complicate the work every once in a while, and forget to teach the beautiful simplicity of Christ's Atonement. Today we got news that at the end of this month there is going to be a worldwide missionary broadcast on this new focus. So excited!!! Love you all and hope the most depressing month of the year is one full of happiness!

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Haha I don't really need ties. Missionaries accumulate quite an astonishing amount of ties by the end of their mission, and when they leave they just offload. I have so many ties. The small things I can just buy here for super cheap, so I am super good on all the little gadgets and stuff. Anyways, we had some interesting things happen this last week. My favorite was probably our baptismal date investigator getting arrested. Ok, so maybe he seemed a little crazy when we talked to him on the street, but not THAT crazy... He would always say "My father was a doctor, my mother was a doctor, my cousin was a doctor, my siblings were all doctors, my...(so on and so forth)", but other than that he seemed relatively normal. He told us he wanted to join our church so how could we not talk to him? Either way, he called us on the phone one day, and it was really hard to hear what he was saying, but eventually we got out from him that he wanted to meet at the second floor of the police station by our apartment. We thought that was weird, but we went and asked the police station if we could go to the second floor. The police officer gave us the look I expected him to give, and then said, "Wait, Huang Guo Fang?" We were like, "Ya!" All of a sudden, like three other police officers were all chatting and laughing about Huang Guo Fang and how two foreign missionaries wanted to meet with him. Eventually they told us they had picked him up the night before (for reasons they couldn't tell us), and that he was just sputtering out nonsense and lies. They told us to stay away from him so we tried until the missionaries from the area next to ours called us on Huang Guo Fang's cell phone and asked why this random guy they had never met new them, knew us, and wanted to talk with them. Oh well, I think it worked out alright. That's pretty much it for now, I love you guys!!!!

this screams Taiwan

another of DanShui, absolutely gorgeous. The picture doesn't do it justice.

Fog over Taipei! 

This picture holds the bottom part of Taipei 101! See if you can find it!  

here is an Ama playgroud (old person workout place) that is clear up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. Elder Sessions (my zone leader whose grandma was my 6th grade elementary school teacher) describes it as Sherwood forest, because there are tons of little dirty shack patio things that all these old people hike up 

into the mountains to go hang out at.

attempt at a panorama. Worked out OK I guess....

The other one is of our whiteboard at English class. We get a little off topic at times... And guess what??? The Taiwanese don't even know the planets! They couldn't name them! Brother Su just had to translate the names using his phone!!!

Sarah, I found your dream. It is a little store in ShiLin called "Brique". There are four artists there. What you do is you go in, choose and artist, and give them a concept. Not a drawing, a concept. They take that concept, draw you something up, and then put it on a shirt, on a wallet, or etc. The first picture is some examples, and the second is what was outside their store. Everything in that store screamed Sarah. We are actually getting Zone T-Shirts from that store, I will have to send you a picture when we get them finished.

New Year 2016

1/3/16

Wow I love the Taiwanese. Hilarious. The other day, we were talking to this young student and we casually asked his name and then asked how old he was. "I'm 16.... because young is POWER!" Elder Dixon and I just about died laughing. After that, we did a few 180s on our bikes because we figured out MRT stations have a tile all the way around the outside that get really slippery when wet (don't worry Mom we had helmets on) and continued finding people to bring closer to Christ. This week, we made a goal to really focus on finding the prepared and really teaching people instead of lessons to get numbers. We have met so many amazing people recently because of the perspective we had.

Cultural Experience:

People think we live at the chapel. Not kidding. Everyone asks us that. Ya our church is at such and such address. Do you live there? No. Do you live right above the chapel? No, we live at our own apartment somewhere else. At a church? No!

With the start of the New Year, a lot of changes are coming to the mission field. I've only heard little rumors so far, but next week I can give specifics. I do know that there is going to be a big stress this year on 'hastening the work' and especially on baptism. I think that is amazing. What an incredible thing to be a part of: missionary work in the final dispensation. The sprint at the end of the race--the final harvest. We aren't just harvesting wheat out here, we are harvesting people. Living, breathing people that are coming to know their loving Heavenly Father. I love reading emails from fellow missionaries about their personal experiences in hastening the work of salvation. I love being out here on the front lines just making people smile, and I can't wait to welcome in a whole year, 2016, of being found in the service of my God. I love you all!

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Fairly low key New Years I guess you could say, but check out video footage or pictures of Taipei 101 at New Years. New Years here is comparable to the Fourth of July in the States, minus all the parades. Plus 7 or 8 million people. They have the day before and the day after off of work (very very very very rare here) so they all go vacationing and stay up super late, but that is pretty much it. There were floods of people here in Beitou to go to the hot springs. We just kind of went to bed and then woke up and said, "Hey! Wow! Now we have to write 2016 in our missionary planners!" I think my journal is still in 2015 though because there wasn't a big enough event to remind me to change it. Oh boy are you right about Guo Nian being the biggest holiday in Taiwan. I just hear story after story after story about the Chinese New Year. That quote from Christian literally just about made me die! Did I tell you about the pupusas in Modesto? There was this little shop that I would go to all the time. Only pupuseria in the whole valley! Awesome Google Beanies in those pictures btw!!! Sorry the emails are late this week, we went to a 'eat until full' Pizza Hut. They had awesome Taro pizza that I will have to send you a picture of. They don't have that in your local Centerville Pizza Hut joint right? If they do, go get it. It's purple! I'm sorry, I want to write more but I'm not sure what to write about. I don't like hot pot. Huo Guo. The Taiwanese love it. Basically, you get a pot of boiling water and then it's just kinda whatever you want from there. They put literally everything in there. Coagulated pig blood, fish balls, duck neck, pork liver, shrimp, you name it. The Taiwanese food is amazing, but they can keep their hot pots. I'm not even kidding about those ingredients by the way, those are the more normal stuff. I think most Americans would love Taiwanese street food. I think most Americans would hate Taiwanese home-cooked food. There are wild dogs everywhere. Only the poorest of poor eat them though. My companion and I got the same score in bowling last week: 101. Companionship unity right there. And the whole Taipei 101 as well. Well, that is pretty much it. I love you all!!!!

Christmas and "Little Rain"

12/27/15

Quick side note before I get started on Christmas as a missionary in Taiwan--I love Xiao Yu. Literally translated: "Little Rain". All the rain I've ever been in is just rain. Like, drops of water. Little did I know that there was another kind of rain. The best way to describe it is the stuff you get when you turn the backyard hose on the 'mist' setting and stand underneath it. Imagine that, but the whole sky is on the 'mist setting'. It is the coolest thing ever. The air kind of sparkles when you look at the space around a streetlight, and it cools you down just enough to make you feel comfortable without feeling cold or suffocated.
 I love it!

Anyways, now I suppose I have to talk about Christmas. First we had the Mission Christmas Conference, where all the missionaries in the whole mission got together at this fancy place in Taipei, did some devotionals, a nativity, and had a talent show. I don't know how, but I ended up in part of a 'improv orchestra' that included the piano, guitar, cello, and violin. Fortunately we played quiet enough that you really couldn't tell I was just pressing random keys that a "Silent Night" would not consist of. Overall, the acting made up for the orchestra and it made for a really touching scene.

Two days later, on Christmas, we got up in the morning and opened our little packages from our families. Then I ate too much candy. Then we had studies and went to Skype our families!! Best part ever! Even though it was hard to hear and we weren't able to say much, the gift of just being able to see my family and just exchange a few words was definitely the highlight of the week. I'm glad the member (whose house we were skyping at) offered me an absolutely foul drink that was supposed to be 'healthy' for my eyes, because it helped fight back the tears of being able to see the faces of my family. Having that experience really made me think. Prayer. Heavenly Father is just sitting up there, waiting excitedly for the next time He gets to talk with us. He wants us to go experience things, go have fun, go learn and grow. Then after, tell Him how it went. Thank Him. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, skype with my family, and pray with my Father in Heaven. I love you all! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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Family-

Haha, love the story about Christian and the pizza! Christian would not survive here. I've told you about the pizzas right? In Taiwan, I swear they don't know what a cheese pizza is. Pizzas need 7 toppings... at least! The baptism went great! Teresa, the one being baptized, was extremely worried about having to be baptized more than once. Unbelievably scared. She didn't have to worry though because it went smooth as could be. She actually lives in Utah! Did I tell you that? She flies home today. Her boyfriend works at the MTC and she lives about a 5 minute walk from the Salt Lake Temple. She was just here for 6 weeks visiting family and decided to get baptized. The mission Christmas conference was awesome. They loved the skit, and President Jergensen asked Sister Wright for a copy of it. You should be able to find clips on Sister Jergensen's webpage. Also, on facebook you might be able to find 北投支會 and like them and be able to find all the videos. That is the Beitou Ward's facebook page. Worth a shot if you've got the time. Haha Mary's gift is a Chinese hackysack. You just kind of kick it like a hackysack. Hackyfeather is I think the English for it. I have no idea. Pretty fun. Sorry the gifts were pretty lame, I did what I could with what little time I had. Hey, I did spend about the same amount on everybody's gifts though. The only one I couldn't really find was for Dad. So Dad, you will get a better gift on your birthday. I figured it would be fun to just get things from Taiwan, regardless of what they actually are. Unfortunately, Taiwan isn't like Japan in that they don't really like 'cute' little things. Well, kind of, but certainly nothing I thought worth sending. Cutesy paper was such a struggle. That was the best I could find Mom. Sorry. Oh and Christians little Pokemon book thing? Jia Qi helped me with that one. We were trying to find Pokemon cards in Chinese, but nothing. She ordered what she thought was Pokemon cards online and that came instead. So, we figured it was good enough just to get a Chinese book thing that he can put my old ones in or something. Your gifts were way better! I love every single one of them! Dad, the book you put together was awesome and I think you spoiled me too much. Mom, the Christ statue is super cool and I am getting totally sick on candy. Sarah.... Just kidding the Plan of Salvation notebook thing is perfect, I just got to find time to write the characters for it! Mary, wow that is so much music! Thank you! I can't stop listening to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Christian, the bookmarks are so funny I love them. Already putting them to use! I felt so loved on Christmas, thank you!!!

​this is the stuff I played at the Christmas conference. I was as confused as you are

President Jergensen doing the Haka with some Polynesian Elders

 the Grand Hotel on our way to the American Club

all the missionaries at the conference

 can you see the millions of motorscooters lined up at this light? about two hundred yards of straight

 lined up motorscooters. Crazy.

Dad, if you ever run for political office again, here is an idea to catch a few eyes.

The picture doesn't fully capture how much water is dripping from the ceiling. Awesome.

the 'infamous' jumping fountains of Beitou. Literally not famous.

BanQiao, where we did a 'a capella' missionary choir performance.

loved my gifts! 

Here is me at the baptism. The water was cold.

Some cool trees in Beitou

Send the other one to the Tiltons and to Grandma and Grandpa Nieman if you get the chance. The Tiltons sent me that cute little paper Christmas tree with ornaments and I'm wearing the tie grandma and grandpa gave me. That was them right? I can't believe I forgot to send them a Christmas present!!!! I am so bummed. Is there like a grandparents awareness day I can send them something for? I'm trying desperately to think of a holiday so I can send them something. Also, I wished I had talked to them more when I had the chance, but unfortunately it was just a little awkward because I didn't realize they would be there and I forgot to think of things to ask them. Haha I should have prepared more. It's not like I didn't have anything to say, it is just hard to get started you know? Regardless, it was totally the highlight of my Christmas!!!!! I love you all!!!! Happy New Years!!