Second Tuesday! We switched up our schedule around a bit today, so I'm starting to write this email without having hand-written a draft before hand--meaning that it will probably be shorter than the last one (I finished that one with only seconds to space).
I've been fighting a cold all week, so I'm not feeling the greatest. But besides that, the second week has been great.
Thanks for the new shoes!! It's unfathomable how much better they are than my old ones. I didn't know shoes could be so uncomfortable in retrospect.
There's only one piece of "big exciting news" this week, so I'll start with that. Apparently, the general authority (or apostle, or member of the seventies or the presidency, it could be anyone) who is speaking at tonight's MTC devoltional has requested to speak with just us Mandarin and Cantonese missionaries at 4:45. I have no idea why, this is the first time anything like this has happened for as long as our branch president has been here--that's 3 years. He says he has a guess of who it might be, since there aren't very many church leaders involved in Mandarin-speaking areas and peoples, but he won't tell us who it is. So it'll be a surprise! Some of the other missionaries have speculated that they might be opening a mission in China, but I highly doubt that. We'll see.
Chinese learning is going slowly... very slowly. They haven't even taught us grammar yet, for the most part, I know only what I can remember from high school and what I study by myself. I'm confident it'll all turn out well, though, no matter how little Chinese I know so far. I'll be starting a few new study techniques Elder Watson told me about tomorrow, we'll see how that goes.
I did see Connor King last week! I've also seen several other friends from BYU, like Keith (forget his last name, and I couldn't read it on his nametag because it was in Polish) who helped me with luggage on the very first day, as well as Elder Walker Franks and Elder Scott Andrews.
Also, I met one of Brynn's mission companions here, she's a teacher. Her name was Sister N-something, it was a long name so it's pretty distinctive.
Not all of my district are leaving on the 29th, though we are all leaving that week. Elders going to Taiwan, for example, leave the 31st I think. Maybe the 30th. Anyways, my guess is that I'll be flying to Australia with my companion, at least until Sydney or something, unless there are direct flights to Brisbane. It's not like we've been told, it's all guesses.
They feed us fine here at the MTC, it's exactly the same food as was in the Cannon Center at BYU (although the lines are much, much longer). I'm doing fine, I'm not a picky eater in the slightest.
So I learned something about myself in regards to Chinese: my favorite accent is the Northern Mainland accent. Which is convenient, because it'll probably be mainland Mandarin speakers I'll be talking to in Australia. We've had another teacher come in these past few days who just got off his mission two months ago from Singapore, and he has this accent. He's hilarious. His name is Brother Moody, so he is Mu Laoshi to us.
That's all that I can think of. My favorite scripture of the moment is Mosiah 4:9, I've been reading through the Book of Mormon and yesterday I found that. I used it later in teaching an "investigator" (i.e. Mu laoshi roleplaying an investigator for us). No progress has been made since last week in regards to the 23 questions, though, unfortunately. Haven't had the time.
Send more letters!
Elder Ladd
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