Another Lovely Day in Taidong

This starts my 3rd week here in Taidong, which seems really fast. I think I'm going to be saying that my whole mission, maybe I'll just make it a blanket statement so you don't have to hear it from me every week. Time is so distorted. 3 weeks will go by before you notice but looking back you cant tell if its been a year. Each transfer is like a new lifetime. Its really messing with my time perception.

Anyway, today our P-day is spent on a huge stake activity. The Stake here is the Hualian stake and stretches to cover the hole lover eastern half of the Island of Taiwan. Its a big area. It is an excercise activity, and I don't exactly know what that means (people tell me its like a huge track meet) but everyone is really really excited about it. So we are going to participate. It is about an hour and a half away so we have to meet at the church at 7 to get ourselves a ride. Which means that we had to get up at 5:30 to get to this lovely net cafe to email by 6. Early day. Afterward we are going to take advantage of the mountain-esque beauty here in southern Taiwan and go mountain biking up to some suspension bridges. I'm excited, that should be really fun, and really beautiful.

Weather here is starting to get really hot again. So far if there is a wind its ok, even pleasant. The sun is shining and buildings are far enough apart that you can see the blue sky. Its a good place. One of my favorite things here in Taidong is biking to visit all of the investigators. We have a very large area that we as sisters cover so sometimes its a 30 to 40 minute bike ride and its just really relaxing. The traffic here is no where near the insanity of the Taipei basin.

We had a pretty good week. Can I remember most of it to tell you what happened? At the moment no. We are so busy that the days and the activities seem to smudge and get all blurry until they sort of blend together. But it was a good week. We really are very busy, we usually have something of non-stop lessons all day, which is good, but doesn't leave much time for finding. (I like teaching better then contacting or knocking doors, but both are very important obviously.) Sister Collyer is really an amazing missionary. She invites absolutely everyone for baptism, on the street, on her bike, with people she has been talking to for less than a minute. I think its a little...strange...but its our purpose, so I'm glad that I have a great example to learn from.

Tonight we are going to go help an investigator paint her house! and I'm pretty excited. Its not often here that we get service opportunities outside of teaching English class. That's actually how we met her though, through English class. She has potential. I hope that she realizes how much the gospel will help her raise her children!

Well that's all the time I have!

I love you all, I hope you February was excellent, are you ready for march? Enjoy the St. Patrick's day green for me!

Sister Melissa Thiessen