March 16, 2015 (Week 13)

March 16, 2015

At the War Museum

This week has been a whole lot better than last week.  Thanks for the prayers, I'm sure you prayed a lot for me.

The weather here is finally starting to pick up, although a couple days last week were brutally cold with the wind. We are still wearing sweaters, although I don't wear the gloves and scarf as much now. It's weird seeing families outside playing in parks here. Korea is a really old country, and since it's been winter nobody has been out. I guess January and February are the worst months, so I will only have one full winter, and catch the front end at the end of my mission. I can't wait for warm weather. It beats freezing any day.


So Tuesday was temple day for us. We did that, which was awesome. The temple here is crazy small, which was weird to me. but it's a really nice temple, and we got an English temple movie (yes!) so that was a great experience. I also picked up a dual English, Korean Preach My Gospel from the distribution center there. After the temple we went to the war museum. It covered everything from ancient wars to huge exhibits for the Korean war. They had a lot of cool stuff, that was awesome. We also ran into a couple former Korean missionaries. One lives off 104th South and 13th West. Small world, haha. I took lots of pictures there, don't worry. So that took us three hours.  Didn't even see all of the museum.  We had to go back so we could get haircuts and shopping in. Haircuts actually turned out better than I expected.  They actually cut hair here really well!  Elder Herron got one and they shaved off his sideburns, so I was a little worried about mine, but it still looks good. We stocked up on fruit too.  We got pears, apples, oranges, kiwis, bananas, grapefruit, and a pineapple. It's awesome how much fruit is here, and it's super cheap at the market by our house.  So that and cereal have been my main foods, along with other Elder Herron concoctions here and there.   That night we went and proselyted (jundo) in a place called Su Sek Dong.  It took us 40 minutes just to walk there, and there was nobody there when we finally got there.  Some places we're assigned here have literally nobody, it kinda sucks.  The ward wants us to branch out of our little routine spot, but that's where everybody goes...

I went on exchanges with a Zone Leader Elder Pans on Wednesday.  That was pretty good.  When we jundoed he would always take over at the end, so that was frustrating but he gave me good advice on being here. He said to love the people, because they can't help just working. Their ratio of working hours to productivity is the lowest in the world. They literally just work to work. They came out of their own industrial revolution just like 50 years ago, so they are still feeling the affects of that. The elderly here are all bent up from working 16-hour day crappy condition jobs.  Look up Park Chung Hee, and the conditions during his time.  He hyper-sped Korea into the world scene, but it screwed half the population in the process.  So that helped me to just love them and realize that they don't know any better.  Kids here slave away at school because they don't know that you can take a break and still be well off in the world.  So he said that and tried to give language advice. That is the most frustrating thing about the language.  Nobody knows how to learn it.  Every answer I get is "it just came one day, I don't really know how." They just say be patient, but my mission is already 3 months down, and I don't want to waste 5 more just trying to get the language.

Pi day (3.14.15)

Saturday was pi day (3.1415) so Elder Herron and Brantley wanted to do pies.  We ended up making 9 butterscotch pies. It was also Sister Olson's b-day so we had a apple crumble cake that night too. So from the hours of 7-9, we had an individual pie, cake, chocolate pies (similar to ding dongs), and fried chicken. Oh man, we all wanted to die by the end. Elder Brantley ended up throwing up that night too. We still feel the affects of it. So fattening, but so delicious.  Korea does fried chicken right (Brad you have no idea).   Rewinding to earlier Saturday day... we taught a guy named Sheen Jay Jeek (신 제 직) at 9:30.  He only believes in the 4 Gospels, Isaiah, and Revelations.  So he basically argued for no prophets, no Book of Mormon, and that everyone has the Holy Ghost, due to the Pentacost. We tried to show him how he was wrong, but he quoted scriptures that he neither believed, nor did they make sense.  So that was a waste of a hour.   A couple hours later we taught Kang Gwee Dong (강귀동).   He is better, but he rambled a lot how his dream is to have robots and humans fuse to create immortality. Hopefully he will progress out of that weird dream. Our appointment right after that was with Jung Day Hoon (정 대 훈).  He is a student who is really quiet. We asked questions like 3 times before he told us "I don't know" .  So it was a really awkward lesson.  He seems really nice, hopefully he will progress too.   30 minutes later we had an intense English class. Two old ladies were there, a mean old lady and Jasmine.  Nobody likes Jasmine there.  She is rude, half the time drunk we think, and just loud. So, the mean old lady should of been in intermediate, but skipped to advance, so we had to go super slow for her. Jasmine kept snapping at her to hurry up and move on, so they started getting into a shouting match. Whitlock and a 18 year old named Alex, (super cool) started yelling at them to quiet down and behave. They still wouldn't stop, so Elder Whitlock was about to throw them out, they were so rude to everyone. So yeah, we had that then pigging out on desserts the rest of the night. Saturday was super busy.

Sunday, church was alright. I understood a lot in priesthood, since it was faith in Jesus as the topic. So that was awesome, then Gospel Principles class came... some old guy taught and I got soooooo lost, it sucked. I didn't get anything out of that.  Sacrament was alright. I still can't understand anything they say... You know how I hate kids.... (no offense everybody) but Korean kids are opening my heart.  They are so funny and can be quite adorable. (I think that's the first time I've said that about kids...(weird)). One kid gave us all superhero names.  I'm Hawkeye i guess, then measured our biceps to see how big we were.  He was hilarious. Later on the way to the subway,  I ran into a group of kids who were shocked when i said hi in Korean. They kept following me to the subway.  They were all pretty funny. We were going to the subway to travel 80 min to Ui Jong Boo (의 정 부) for a baptism. Elder Whitlock baptized one of his investigators from the military base. That was cool to see that. He gave an awesome testimony about being free from and conquer.  So that took most of our Sunday, we just came back and ate before night time.

Personal study this week has been boss.  I never really cared about Jacob, but man, he doesn't hold back in his book. I studied that so much this week. Here are some scriptures from study.

Jacob:
  2:6, 7, 9
  3:9
  4 (18 especially)
  5:41

2 Nephi 33 (especially 6 and 11)

Love you all.  This week has been much better, glad to hear from you all.

-Elder Mortensen