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.

An American in Tainan

This has been a pretty fabulous week, if I do say so myself. I don't really know how to organize this email very well, so I'm just going to have a bunch of little paragraphs of the funny and awesome things that make up my life right now.

My companion: I love being with Sister Shen so much. Her English is FABULOUS and she loves missionary work. She's hilarious and we can easily chat for hours. It's so cool to be able to speak Chinese all the time; I'm stuck between feeling like I'm really improving and feeling like Wow I really don't know a lot of Chinese. Because, like, her Chinese is awesome. Duh. So we are having a lot of fun.

Tainan is great, though a lot different from the areas I've served in before. It is actually the second smallest area in the mission. Like, we can bike from the north to the south border in 15 minutes, and east to west in maybe 30 minutes, and it's all city. Compare that to my first area in Gangshan where if we legitimately biked from one end to the other it would probably take 3 hours. Maybe 4. So it's super tiny and often when we contact people they don't live in our ward, but in the Tainan 1st or 3rd or 4th ward. There are a whole bunch of little streets everywhere and it's kind of like a maze. I can get to the church by myself now though! So that's fun.

I also am in a bigger missionary district now, with 5 companionships (3 elders, 2 sisters) and it's a blast. I'm serving in the same ward with an elder from my MTC district, which is fun, and his companion is also Taiwanese. So sometimes we are just surrounded by Taiwanese people and I'm like Wow you are all talking really fast. I'm not sure my head can fit quite that much Chinese in it at once. But I'll get used to it. 

People here are so nice! Some people say that the further south you go in Taiwan, the more relaxed and nicer people are. I don't know how much that's true, but the first few days here I was really impressed with how nice people are. Like, in Taizhong on the street maybe 70% of people will take the flier you give them, but here it's more like 90%. So that's cool! And our first day tracting we met two people who were happy let us come back. And the ward is super nice; we actually live on the floor above some really strong members and they invite us to dinner every Sunday.

Someone told me the other day that they have a joke; when someone is taking a long time doing something the other person will say, "Come on hurry up, we don't have American time here!" So the other day I said that to the other American and everyone laughed.

There was a baptism on Saturday that we went to and a lady came up to me, pulled up her skirt to show me she was wearing purple shorts and said, "I wear these for safety. When I ride a scooter the wind blows my skirt around. But it's not for my safety; it's for everyone's safety so they don't see me and get in an accident!" Hahahaha. I love old Taiwanese ladies.

Yep, life is good. I'm excited about my area and my companion and I love Taiwan. 

Oh, I almost forgot! I officially hit my year mark on my mission last week. I think I might be an old missionary. So weird! I'm down to a little more than 6 months. Crazy.

Love you all!

Sister Cardon

PS Pathetic that this was the only picture I have of the two of us. I will strive to take more pictures next week.

Proud to Be an American

Happy Fourth of July weekend from Taiwan! No, no fireworks. No one put their American flag out. No striped bunting. Only a few people sporting red, white, and blue. Indeed, the only patriotism I felt on Saturday was the America that we brought in our hearts.

ACTUALLY that's not true because we did end up having a super awesome American Style Barbecue for a ward activity! Last month the missionaries in Daya and Tanzi got together and decided we wanted to hold a church tour and barbecue together, just like they did on the District. So we made it happen and it was super great! It was also a good example of problem solving, because we had a lot of random little problems come up that we just had to figure out, For example:

We planned a sponge-and-bucket relay game but no one bought buckets. Let's ride to the junk store and buy them right now!

Ran out of water balloons in the middle of the game. Fill up some more!

The tour was supposed to start at 10:45 and last an hour, but they actually started at 10:30 and were done by 11:15. We told everyone to go up to the chapel and just started singing hymns, and the elders made an impromptu a capella men's quartet. It was great.

Games were supposed to last until 1:30. but everyone just decided to go home by 1:15. More clean up time!

Overall, it really was a great activity. A member brought his food truck and made a bunch of hamburgers that tried SO HARD to be real American hamburgers but didn't quite make it. Also, I'm not sure why Taiwanese think a dark green drink made out of leaves with black tree fungus in it makes an appropriate beverage for a barbecue but like, whatever totes your goat. After we were done cleaning up a memeber asked all of the missionaries to come into a classroom and sing The Star-Spangled Banner for a random class that was happening. We sounded pretty stellar. And don't worry,. we sang lots of Neil Diamond in the apartment. And biking on the way to church.

So, it was a successful weekend. Other highlights of the week include Zone Training meeting (which for some reason always includes missionaries doing a ridiculous skit that's pretty hilarious) and interviews with President and Sister Blickenstaff. Every three months we get to have a 12 minute interview with our mission president and it's really nice, you always learn a lot. I always sort of wish I could record the whole thing so I could remember all of the fabulous advice he gave me. One thing he told me was that one of the best gifts you can give to your companion is to just be happy and have a good attitude all the time. Duh! Attitude is everything. I know that when we are happy in doing the Lord's work (and just like, all the time) then life really is good. Gray skies are going to clear up! Haha gray skies would be really nice right now. It's hot.

Love you all! Hope you had a good American weekend.

Sister Cardon

Pictures: 

Water balloon toss! A Fourth of July favorite.

Impromptu missionary choir! 'Murica.

Cows and Marriage

This was one of those weeks when you are like, super tired at the end of Sunday night, and you're really ready for P-day, but that just makes it so you feel like you accomplished the things you needed to! We had a good week this week. We found some awesome new investigators, including a cool young mom from China who was super direct in the lesson. "What is it you want me to do when we are meeting?" "Am I supposed to memorize scriptures every day?" She was seriously super cool. And willing to set up for next week! Yay! 

Hmm what else. Ate some good food this week, the members are always so generous and willing to invite us over to eat. We have a new Ward Mission Leader, who is a member who works closely with the missionaries to help do missionary work in the ward, and we are helping him get settled and ready to work. Our ward really is awesome! I was thinking the other how great it is to have good relationships with the members in Daya and how we all work together and I know that they support us. And our district is working well together in helping our investigators get baptized. Tracy is still on her way to being baptized on Friday; we had a bit of a scare when we couldn't figure out a time that President Blickenstaff and her both had free to do an interview. I think I made like 12 phone calls about the same thing yesterday. Maybe that's why I was so tired.

It's still hot and sweaty, I'm realizing again that there's a lot of Chinese I don't know (and that it's super hard to understand people from Northern China), and sometimes I forget to drink water. I've got a super fabulous farmer's tan. Little 70-year-old Taiwanese grandmas are like my favorite people ever. My companion and I are pretty hilarious together.

Funny thing that happened in Chinese this week: the word for "finish" is "jieshu" and the word for "marriage" is "jiehun," which are super different to Chinese people but easily mixed up for Americans. So after we finished a game in FHE the other day one of the elders said, "alright, we're married!" He's going home next month. The other elders teased him pretty hard about it.

Last Monday we had a fun day and went to a place called Donghai to take pictures in front of a cool church. We met up with the sisters over there (SO fun, man I never get to hang out with sisters) and took cute pictures and ate Korean food and ice cream. We were walking around the college campus there where they have a college dairy and homemade ice cream. The outside of the building is painted like a cow and you can go and see the cows. It was super funny though because the Taiwanese girls we were with were like, "Hey, we can go see the cows!" "Yeah that sounds fun, let's see the cows!" and we're like, "...yes. Cows." Cows are not a super common thing here, it turns out. But chickens are! And turns out they have chickens that have black meat. Like, literally the bones and meat of the chicken are black. We ate some last night. It was a little disconcerting.

So that's about it! I've been working on improving my teaching skills and being nice and working with my companion. We are having a good time. We've figured out that it is possible to give your companion a bite of the doughnut you were eating while you are both riding in motion, so I guess you could say our bike skills are pretty serious. Except for the time I swerved to avoid a guy sticking his cigarette out the window and I accidentally bumped into her and we both went AAHH for a bit. Life is good!

Love you all!

Sister Cardon

sorry no pictures this week because this computer is struggling.

Re: A Pretty Solid Week

Ellyn was for some inexplicable reason unable to send her email to the normal recipients, so I have been charged with forwarding this to all of you:

This week's interesting start to my email is a list of things I've
eaten recently.

a lot of dumplings
multiple variations on noodles and soup
super delicious mangoes
really really sour tiny plums
pink dragonfruit
super cheap steak that might not be steak
pickled cow stomach
lychees that kind of look like alien fruit and have to be peeled to be eaten
various leafy vegetables I've never seen before
and last but not least
barbecued chicken butt.

In other news, it's been a pretty regular week. We had a district
meeting on Tuesday where we talked about the importance of church
attendance and how to get our investigators to come to church. We
decided to take it to heart and work super hard to get people to come
to church. We invited like everybody, we set up rides for people, we
called them on Saturday and Sunday, we called them on Sunday
afternoon... and most people bailed out at the last minute. Donny
Osmond lady, bless her heart, told me every excuse from My Son is
Going to School Today to I Need to Do the Lunch Dishes. "He can go to
school, and you can go to church!" "We will come and do the dishes
with you and then you can come to church with us." Finally she called
back and said she really couldn't come today, but I made her promise
(...almost) to come next week. It's gonna happen. It's gonna work.

It's rained a few more times but not too badly this week, lots of
people tell me I should wear long sleeves so I don't get sunburned. A
lot of Taiwanese people wear more clothes during the summer because
they are so afraid of getting tan. The rice fields are getting taller.
We're meeting with some pretty cool investigators who need the gospel,
and a girl named Tracy finally decided to be baptized on June 19th!
We're super excited for her and her brother to be baptized together.
Woohoo!

Chinese phrase of the week: Zhen de jia de?! it literally means "true
false", and I have picked up saying it whenever something is
surprising, like "no way, man!" But you have to say it really
exaggerated, with the "zhen" really high in your voice and the "jia"
kind of low. Plus the best aghast look you can muster. Side note I
legimately have some sort of dramatic filter when I translate Chinese
now, like people say things in a normal voice but if I try to tell my
companion what they said later it comes out like a cheesy movie. It
makes life fun.

So yep, that's about it. Nex week is the end of this transfer, which
is weird. Life goes by fast! Sister Findlay and I will be staying
together for another six weeks for sure, because we are in training.
We're having a good time and looking forward to the hot, sweaty
summer.

Love you all!
Sister Cardon

On Sun, May 17, 2015 at 8:35 PM, Ellyn Cardon <ellyn.cardon@myldsmail.net> wrote:

I think I would classify this week as "pretty solid." 

We had zone conference on Tuesday, which was super awesome. All of the missionaries in Taizhong got together and were able to learn from our mission leaders, which is always a neat opportunity. I was definitely inspired to be a better missionary; this week I have been studiously studying Preach My Gospel and working on following up with our investigators, from which we have already seen a lot of success.

Other highlights from zone conference:

-Sister Blickenstaff asked me to be in charge of a musical number, so I wrangled some missionaries together and we sang "Seek This Jesus," written by my aunt and mother! It went really well and definitely brought the Spirit into the meeting. Extra cool was that we sang it at the beginning, and President Blickenstaff's closing remarks at the end were focused on the scriptures from Alma 32. Totally wrapped it all together.

-got to see a lot of the missionaries from my MTC district! It's cool to see how much the missionaries I knew at the beginning have grown, and that helps me recognize that I have learned a lot too.

-because I am training a new missionary I got to introduce my companion to the rest of the mission! I only remembered that I was doing so likie 5 minutes before the meeting so I wrote a few haikus and told everyone how awesome she is. At one point I said, "We work hard together, we laugh together, we have fun together..." and from behind me President Blickenstaff said, "You get hit by cars together..." It was pretty funny. BTW we're all good now, just a few minor bruises left.

My favorite person we've met with this week is Tracy, who has been meeting with missionaries for over a year now. There was a little bit of a mix up with where she lived and what ward she should be going to, but for now she and her brother are coming to Daya so we are teaching her. Last September she and her brother both had a dream that they would be baptized on August 1st of this year, so we are doing everything we can to make sure she does that. Satan doesn't want her to. But Satan will lose. But we had an awesome lesson with her about faith and I think we are really going to help her.

So yep, that's about this week! We are still grounded from biking so have been doing a lot of walking and bus riding this week, but it's been going fairly well and we've still managed to get to appointments on time. So life is good! Still doing the work, saving souls, etc.

Love you all, hope you have a great week!

Sister Cardon

Picture: This is a cute girl we went to visit the other day who ALSO got in a car accident a few weeks ago. Their family is really awesome and every time we go over there she tells us we are pretty.

A Pretty Solid Week

I think I would classify this week as "pretty solid." 

We had zone conference on Tuesday, which was super awesome. All of the missionaries in Taizhong got together and were able to learn from our mission leaders, which is always a neat opportunity. I was definitely inspired to be a better missionary; this week I have been studiously studying Preach My Gospel and working on following up with our investigators, from which we have already seen a lot of success.

Other highlights from zone conference:

-Sister Blickenstaff asked me to be in charge of a musical number, so I wrangled some missionaries together and we sang "Seek This Jesus," written by my aunt and mother! It went really well and definitely brought the Spirit into the meeting. Extra cool was that we sang it at the beginning, and President Blickenstaff's closing remarks at the end were focused on the scriptures from Alma 32. Totally wrapped it all together.

-got to see a lot of the missionaries from my MTC district! It's cool to see how much the missionaries I knew at the beginning have grown, and that helps me recognize that I have learned a lot too.

-because I am training a new missionary I got to introduce my companion to the rest of the mission! I only remembered that I was doing so likie 5 minutes before the meeting so I wrote a few haikus and told everyone how awesome she is. At one point I said, "We work hard together, we laugh together, we have fun together..." and from behind me President Blickenstaff said, "You get hit by cars together..." It was pretty funny. BTW we're all good now, just a few minor bruises left.

My favorite person we've met with this week is Tracy, who has been meeting with missionaries for over a year now. There was a little bit of a mix up with where she lived and what ward she should be going to, but for now she and her brother are coming to Daya so we are teaching her. Last September she and her brother both had a dream that they would be baptized on August 1st of this year, so we are doing everything we can to make sure she does that. Satan doesn't want her to. But Satan will lose. But we had an awesome lesson with her about faith and I think we are really going to help her.

So yep, that's about this week! We are still grounded from biking so have been doing a lot of walking and bus riding this week, but it's been going fairly well and we've still managed to get to appointments on time. So life is good! Still doing the work, saving souls, etc.

Love you all, hope you have a great week!

Sister Cardon

Picture: This is a cute girl we went to visit the other day who ALSO got in a car accident a few weeks ago. Their family is really awesome and every time we go over there she tells us we are pretty.