April 13, 2015 (Week 17)

April 13, 2015

Cherry Blossoms in Bloom

After email last week, we tried some wonderful Dash (oops sorry, I meant dog) soup for P-Day. The restaurant itself smelled so bad, it clogged my nose for the rest of the night. Super strong and really bad smelling. The dog soup itself wasn't bad. Dog meat was a little too chewy for me, but it was still overall pretty good. That was the highlight of P-Day.  During shopping I asked for some broccoli, and an old guy told me in English stuff, then the grandmas by him started telling him that we were good at Korean, so we started to talk to them about why we were learning Korean.   Kinda sad though, that missionaries are never super good at Korean.  People who have been here for a year and a half are still not super great at Korean. Elder Ringwoods talk about his companion is still true today about Korean.  Some missionaries just give up on it though, and just struggle the rest of their mission.
This week cherry blossoms just came out in full force. The river path was just lined with them. It was a great view. We also went on the river a lot this week. Monday we were jundoing [proselyting] along the street, then we saw the grandmas dancing again. We decided to check it out since we were right there. That was awesome. Just a bunch of grandmas dance exercising at 8 at night under a bridge. We joined in for a minute, until some lady started "hitting" on me... awkward...   The next day we saw a bunch of grandpas playing chess under a bridge too, that was quite hilarious to see. Old people here are really strange.

The next day we went down to where there was a college and looked around to see if there was a good place to streetboard around it. It's like Snow College, where it isn't the best school out there. Turns out its not even our area, so we kinda had to scrap jundoing there. The college itself wasn't bad, but half of it was just a big sport court. They don't have fields here though, it's all just dirt. Kinda lame to see.  On the way back we started talking to some guy who asked why God lets things like war happened. We were talking to him for a while, super nice guy and great at English. Then, some old lady came up in the middle of it, and asked if we spoke Korean. She then grabbed our butts and walked away.... weird things happened here. But the guy was super cool. Wish he wanted to meet with us.

On Wednesday, we had a zone conference where they wanted our house to do another number. So we went over and I got to play more piano. That was cool. They sang "Brightly  Beams our Fathers Mercy." Good song.  After conference, we tried out streetboarding at one of the subway exit points. That was cool. I originally just stood by the poster, but Elder Cazier came and sat there so I went and jundoed around the crosswalks. It was weird seeing 11 other missionaries all jundoing around the same intersection. It was cool to just go off by myself and rely on only me for it. Elder whitlock somehow got 5 appointments out of it, and overall we got like 40 people in the hour we were out there. So it was pretty fun, and somewhat worked. Elders Herron and Brantley already got a progressing investigator out of it, so it was pretty successful.

Thursday we had no plans, so we went to our random area, Jee Chuuk 지축. That place is a barren wasteland. We went outside of Seoul for it.  There was nothing there.  We stepped off the sub and just looked around lost. We saw like 3 people there in 30 minutes, so we just headed back to 구파발 Gu Pa Bal and jundoed there. That's a nice place.  Fairly new, and super cool. You'll have to google map it.  Elder Whitlock also finally quit his ridiculous diet. He realized how much attention he put on it and how that wasn't the best option.  So he finally quit that and is getting back on track for missionary work.

Eating Crepes

For Conference we made some delicious crepes. We had jam, strawberries, bananas, whipped cream... oh man, so good. I love crepes. We had those then headed over to the church. Elder Ringwood (Area 70 in charge of Korea) and Elder Anderson (learn to dance/music) and President Uchtdorf nailed there talks. I loved all of those. President Uchtdorfs priesthood one was great. I loved it.   We all just crammed in the Visitor Center for it, and watched there in English. In between sessions we had jja ja myung on Saturday, and just a rice soup thing for Sunday. Both super good and filling meals. Conference was great, super good talks the whole way through.

Well, this week for teaching sucked. We had 5 people bail, including a really cool potential. Kim Kee Ram says he is too busy to meet, so we may not be meeting him for a while, if ever. Lee Ho Kyung speaks super fast and slangy, even Elder Whitlock can't understand, so we gave him to the Zone Leaders, who have a Korean in the companionship. Bang Suck Gyou bailed on us for General Conference, and we are planning to transfer him to Shindong ward, which is like 10 minutes from him, not and hour to our ward. He is always too busy to meet, so hopefully he can meet with Shindong more often. So right now we have 0 people, and only a couple lessons planned right now..... not too much fun.

The language is coming along.  Lesson 4 has a ton of new vocabulary so I'm stuck on that, and my English is slowly going. Since English and Korean are so different, my English grammar is getting thrown out the window. Instead of "I see the ball", Korean is "I ball see". It's soo backward. So now my English makes me sound dyslexic. But yeah, That's fun being in language limbo, as it were.

Grandma's Dancing

Personal study was Ammon and Aaron.  Great stuff in there, I just barely hit Ammon boasting in the Lord. Went over 2 Cor. 12, and read Shiblons story. All great things. I recommend going through those chapters. Aaron really related to me right now.

Love you all, keep it strong
Elder Mortensen
Psalms 147:3-4