Mid Autumn Festival

Hey All,

So this weeks P-day wasn't all that exciting. Pretty much just playing frisbee, volleyball, and various other games with the other missionaries.

On Tuesday Elder Peterson (my district leader) and I started our exchange. All our appointments fell through so we just did a ton of knocking over the course of two days. We did get to visit one of our friends with whom we had lost contact with for a week or so. That was good.

Wednesday night we had the first English Club meeting where we used the new curriculum. It was pretty interesting. The office is supposed to send us slideshow presentations that will serve to organize the class experience but because Hualian is so far away we won't be getting them for another week. Without the slides it was kind of a mess, but we are supposed to get the slides for next week. Crossing our fingers!

Thursday morning during language study we got a call from the Fenglin Elders asking us to help them come clean their new apartment. They have been trying to move to this other town in their area for a while but every house in the town was taken. Finally one house opened up but the guy who used to live there left basically everything. Even a refrigerator completely full of expired food. So they asked for some help and that took most of the day. It was an interesting change of plans from the beginning of the day where we had no appointments and just planned on finding for hours!

Friday was the Mid-Autumn festival and it is a tradition for people to BBQ outside ther house so we spent our evening going from house to house talking to all the families at thier BBQs. It was actually really successful and we got a few people to set up times to meet with us, as well as getting some meat and stuff given to us. Taiwanese people are very hospitable and are always trying to give you food! 

Saturday was a ton of fun. We had English Club in the morning but at the same time there was a Taiwan wide YSA conference going on in the chapel so afterwards I saw a lot of familiar faces from old areas, and even my Branch President from the MTC who is back in Taiwan with is wife as some sort of special self reliance missionaries or something. It was a fun time and we got to spend the night doing more of our new favorite method of finding: Mid-Autumn festival BBQ finding! People were still out BBQing tonight so we got to walk around the streets, say high and got invited to sit down and eat at pretty much every party we passed! 

It was a fun week. National Holidays always make for an exciting change of pace. 

Have a good one

Elder Neilson

getting ice cream after cleaning elders apartment

- eating some moon cakes

- random BBQ we got invited to

 path we took that turned out to not be a road

all the food people give you during the mid autumn festival featuring a lot of Pomello which is the big green fruit. It's only really eaten durring this festival. Think grapefruit that is really hard to peel and doesn't have as much flavor.