Week 18 - Retraining Cantonese Listening; Apartment Cleaning; Love Companion, Love the People, Love God and Love your Mission Leaders; Thanksgiving Zone Conference and Dinner; Tim is getting baptized; Exchanges with Elder Lee;

Well this makes three weeks down in Hong Kong almost. It's so weird still. I feel like I'm getting the hang of some things, but others not so much. Cantonese is still kicking my butt. Some people speak with really weird accents or really mumble so I have to retrain my listening. Slowly, our apartment is getting cleared out of junk and garbage, but a certain member of the apartment enjoys filling the new space with more junk and garbage. At least I have my little area where I can keep things clean.

This week, we had Zone Conference with the whole mission for Thanksgiving. The thing I took away from all the trainings was something President said about his only expectations for every missionary. Number one, love your companion. Number 2, love the people. Number three, love God. Number four, love your mission President and his wife (which the handbook now has us just call "mission leaders"). I really liked that because if we really do all four of these things, all the other stuff will fall into place and our lives will be so much easier. We will truly be motivated to do the right things for the right reasons. After Zone Conference, we had a Thanksgiving feast. We had super tasty sliced ham and turkey with mashed potatoes, a weird pear salad, and pumpkin cake for dinner. It was so tasty, very nice to get some American food again.

Every day this week we have been doing a lot of finding to finally get some more people to teach. We have one kid  named Tim who is a former that wants to start taking lessons again, but that is not nearly enough to occupy our time. He's awesome though, he set a baptismal date the other day. Elder Finklea couldn't even finish getting out "Are you willing?" before Tim said "Yes!" Super cool. But the finding isn't as successful. There is a lot of walking involved, a lot of rejection, but a lot of funny stuff too. The only bummer part is that I had been experiencing some weird pain in my shoulder and chest as we would find and it really made things not fun at all. I talked with the mission nurse and it turns out I've inflamed the cartilage in my ribs or something. So now I'm on an "anti-inflammatory dose" of 12 ibuprofen a day. Sick. It's doing a lot better now though so the work goes on. 

The other cool thing that happened this week was an exchange with some Elders in Tsing Yi. I got to go be with Elder Lee and one of his companions for a day. We had a blast teaching English class, teaching a lesson to a recent convert, and getting destroyed at a ping pong activity. It was fun to talk with him about how much things have changed since high school. We also had this guy named Andy, who lives most of the time in Vancouver, take us out to dinner. It was a party, he's not a member, but he loves to treat the missionaries when he's in town. He speaks crazy good English but all at a monotone, so it is hard to get when he's joking sometimes. Elder Finklea and I are going out with him today too. 

Other than that, it's been a pretty good week. Members fed us so much this week that I didn't even touch all the groceries I bought last weekend. I'm so lucky to be here. It blows my mind every day. See you around.

-Elder Murray

Additional pictures sent last week