A Korean and an American walk into a barbecue...

First of all, Happy Mid-Autumn festival! This week has been full of barbecues and moon cakes and it has been great. There's also a typhoon happening today so the ward barbecue got cancelled. But that's okay. Mid-Autumn festival is another chance for people to take the day off when people don't really know what the holiday is about and get the family together. And I love a good Taiwanese barbecue; there's a distinct lack of hamburgers and potato salad but a whole bunch of anything else you could think of to barbecue: thin pork slices, sausage, mushrooms, baby bamboo, etc. It's pretty good. Yeah. Taiwan.

I love my new area! Shizhong is great. I've been pretty lucky to have served in a wide range of areas: rural rice fields, friendly neighborhood feel, college campus, and now the downtown. Seriously, if you're ever along and life is making you lonely you can always come to Shizhong. We've got glitzy malls and expensive hot pot and giant roads and a subway system. Hey this is the first time I've really had a subway system in my area! That's cool. Shizhong is also beautiful; we got the Love River running right through our area so we get to bike over plenty of bridges and contact people sitting along the river enjoying the lights in the evening. It's pretty great. The only downside is that our apartment (a super NICE apartment reminiscent of our apartment in Beijing 4 years ago) is like 20 minutes away from everything and we have to bike over a huge bridge to get home. Get some serious thigh burn every morning. It's great.

And I love my companion! She is Korean and cute. Oh I think I never mentioned her name: Sister Eo! (you say it "oh") But her Chinese name is "Yu Jie Mei": Sister Fish. She reads and writes English pretty well but doesn't speak it much, so we just speak Chinese to each other all the time. It's pretty funny sometimes. For instance (this was all spoken in Chinese):

Me: We could now grab the thing or go church grab the thing.

Sister Eo: ...I don't understand.

Me: ...yeah me neither.

Sister Eo: Grab the thing now or at church grab?

Me: Yeah.

Sister Eo: ...the same.

Me: Yeah.

Haha it's great. We're both doing our best. Her Chinese is awesome; she lived in Harbin, China for a year and speaks and reads really well. We're both learning!

You know, it is the coolest thing how just when you are kind of down or discouraged, Heavenly Father sends you some tender mercies to lift you up. Yesterday was kind of a low-key Sunday and we both had a bit of ennui. We had a lessons with some new investigators who weren't that interested and don't live in our area, and when we called a less active member she said she didn't want to meet with us and waste both of our time. Ouch! But we decided to go out tracting and try to find some families at home. Found a street, starting going down in and realized every single house had a giant Buddhist altar in the living room. Knocked on one door and a guy kind of angrily opened the mailbox peephole thing and said a Korean missionary came a few days ago, I didn't want it then and I don't want it now, why won't you guys leave me alone? (I'm not sure who is going around Shizhong parading as my companion, but we definitely did not knock on that door recently.)

BUT then we walked a little further and ran into the cutest scene ever: a family having a barbecue. They had two cute little kids and they immediately invited us to sit down and eat with them, you two are so beautiful where are you from, have some more pork, oh you are missionaries that's so great of you! It felt so nice to sit down and be a family with them. They brought out little sparklers and there were fireworks in the distance and for all intensive purposes it could have been a 4th of July barbecue with my cousins. Except, we were all speaking Chinese. And they offered us beer. But.

In conclusion, you know, God really watches out for all of His children. He cares about each of us and He wants us all to be happy. He knew I needed to have that virtual hug, and He knew that family needed to meet the missionaries and find out how they can be happy like that forever. We are going to go back next week and I can totally see them coming to church and learning about the gospel and getting baptized one day. Woohoo! Miracles happen.

Love you all! Hope you had a wonderful Mid-Autumn Festival as well.

Sister Cardon

Super Great

Sorry guys, shorter email this week because I am almost out of time!

We've had a good 10 days since I emailed. Tracting in the hot sun. Lessons on random doctrinal things. Stake Conference! I should drink more water.

Most humbling moment: Usually when I say something wrong in Chinese it is just with my companion and is not too big of a deal, because she knew what I meant to say, etc. Well, last week we were in Sunday School talking about missionary work, so of course the missionaries were called upon to share. And elder was talking about how even though it is hot and you are getting rejected and you are really tired, you can still be happy. For some reason I decided to pipe in, "or if you are really wet!" in the middle of his share. "Shi1 shi1 de", wet. Well, after I said it I realized that no one really gave any sort of response, not even like a pity chuckle. There was just sort of an awkward silence and then I heard someone behind me whisper to their neighbor, "what does that mean?" I turned around. "Shi shi de, like when it rains." Then the chorus of understanding was let out, "ohhhh shi shi de like when it's raining and you are all wet" "oh okay she was talking about rain" "yeah like really wet." I was super confused on why everyone had reacted that way when finally someone was like "we thought you said 'or if you're dead.' "

Super cool stake conference this week: Elder Wong of the Seventy came to visit Tainan and we had some awesome sessions on Saturday night and Sunday morning. He is super funny and was getting all involved with the audience asking question and stuff on Saturday night. The cool thing is that he is actually from Hong Kong so doesn't speak Mandarin fluently; he speaks it really well, but sometimes he would pause and say things a few times to get the tones right. It made me feel better that if a Seventy is struggling with Chinese, I can struggle a little too. The main theme on Saturday was keeping the Sabbath day holy and really appreciating it, so he had this thing where he asked everyone to tell him what sort of things are distracting during sacrament meeting and how to fix it, "so we can help those other countries that struggle with these problems." At one point he said that missionaries often worry about what the speakers in sacrament meeting will talk about in case their investigator would think it was weird, and I guess I nodded a little too emphatically because he called on me and said, "This sister is very brave, she is saying the talks in her sacrament meeting are bad! Why don't you tell us something that can help investigators and members in that case?" oops. So I stood up and started talking and said that we should remember to testify of Christ in sacrament meeting, not ourselves. Always a good thing.

On Sunday his theme was talking about going from "great" to "super great" and it was a good reminder that no matter how great we are doing, we can always take that extra step to be super great.

Love you all! Have a good week.