Week 5

This week was pretty good, and every week keeps getting faster. Tomorrow we will be the oldest generation of Mandarins here, which is so weird to think. When I got here I thought the oldest generation was super amazing at Chinese, but now I realize how bad they must have been.

On Tuesday we had the devotional at the Marriott Center, and me and the kids in my room were some of the first people there. It was one of the First Quorum of the Seventy guys who spoke, and it was good, but the seats are not too comfortable and the choir was probably over 1/2 the MTC. Yesterday's devotional came from Wyview, which was super weird. It was the Missionary Department head again and he gave the talk he was going to give that one time when he had something prepared but didn't give it because he felt prompted to talk about something else.

Another exciting thing that happened yesterday was that the First Counselor of the MTC came to our Sacrament Meeting and our branch split, since it was soon going to have 150+ missionaries. It's weird to think the day before we got in, it was only 35. There are now more Mandarins than Germans. I'm still in the same branch as Elder Humphries. The president of the new branch served a mission in India with his wife, which is super cool. He doesn't speak Chinese, though, so that might be a challenge for him.

I've seen Elder Norris a few times. He has the same gym time as I do.

Maybe I told you this was going to happen, but this week Elder Coloumbe (our missionary from Quebec going to Paris) had to go back to Montreal to appeal for his visa (most people go to San Francisco, since they are Americans) and he left at night, flew to Detroit, went alone to the consulate, then flew to Atlanta and back to Salt Lake City, in about 24 hours. Isn't that crazy? His companion got to sleep with us for two nights.

Tonight we get to do something exciting - Skype TRC to native members in Taiwan. We got to teach a nonmember on Saturday, too, which was interesting.

Maybe the coolest thing that happened this week was that I got a haircut, and they have this cool machine that pretty much vacuums your head. It actually wasn't that cool, but it was weird.

This week the mission president training is starting so the main MTC building will soon be blocked off to us, and we get to have sack lunches and breakfasts every day. Then we get the cool devotional thing at the Marriot Center after a huge MTC-wide sacrament meeting.

I talked to one of the teachers who served in Singapore, and he told us some cool stuff. He says at most there are 10 Chinese missionaries in the mission, and we are the first since September. There is a good chance I'll be with Elder Sutherland or Elder Mitchell in the field. He said that 4 missionaries are in Singapore, and the other ones switch around, but they are for sure in two cities in East Malaysia. He said East Malaysia is way more likely to go than West Malaysia for Chinese missionaries. And he said it's very unlikely I'll ever be paired with a Malay missionary.