Week 73

Alright another great week here in Australia! 

It was so good to talk to all of you on friday. it looks like you are doing great. weird how much has changed since 16 months ago. hopefully i still fit in in august! haha Thank you for your love and support. it honestly means the world to me. Love you guys so much! and can't wait for mother's day! i'll almost be home by then.... haha let's not think about that. 

Not much has happened since i talked to you on friday. But we did have a part member family come to church! it was awesome. They live like 45 min out of mudgee and have two little kids so it was a big sacrifice for them. The wife is the member. debbie and gary are their names. They are really cool. we've been out to their house a couple times and they have horses and sheep and ponies and cows and chickens. it was pretty sweet. It's kindof weird because there's like heaps of ponies here. i don't know exactly why because they don't seem to serve much of a purpose, but there's tons of them. haha 

I guess i didn't tell you about mission conference so i'll tell you about that. We slept over in bathurst on sunday night because it's a bit closer and the whole zone slept there (well, all the elders, at least) and then we got up early and drove down to sydney. we had to leave at 6:00 and we got there at about 9:30. Somehow we missed the traffic. it was a christmas miracle! haha but we socialized for a while until they called us into the chapel for the program. Each zone performed a musical number and they had a bunch of speakers. one of them was Elder Randle! haha he's the man. Smashed it on the talk. Our zone did "once in royal david's city" to the tune of come thou fount. Yeah, it was awesome. and yes, it was my idea. but of course the zone leaders got credit for it.... hahah all good. But the program was really good. Spiritually uplifting and motivating. Then we had lunch, which was really good. It is always good food here in the ASSM. (We say A double S M haha) We set up a "chinese only table" haha it was great. all the mandarin speakers and the guys from mainland and taiwan. the hong kong-ers were at a different table. We didn't want none of that 广东话。(cantonese) haha It was way fun, though. i love hanging out with those guys. 

Elder Ward is training an elder from Beijing, and get this, they're in the cantonese branch! hahaha what the heck?? neither of them speak cantonese but apparently they have people translating everything into mandarin and most of their investigators are from mainland china. haha Shucks, they're so lucky. And the cantonese branch boundaries go up into the north mission so they get to go up into sydney! they said their branch mission leader lives like way close to the harbor bridge.... dang maybe i will put in a dying wish to president back... i'm hoping my next area is my last. i don't want to have any more two transfer areas. 

Elder Hixson gave me a bottle of Lao Gan Ma which made me extremely happy. Im convinced that is what makes my chinese improve. so hopefully if i keep eating that i will be able to hold onto some chinese. hahaha but then after lunch we took down the tables and watched Saratov Approach. I really loved it. haha we were laughing because i pointed out that us watching that is like watching the Titanic while you're on a cruise. hahaha but it was still good. Had to choke back some tears there at the end. And then after that we just socialized and played some games that they set up for a couple hours and then went home. We got permission to stop at one of the shops in Liverpool and grabbed some Koko Samoa and mangos. These mangoes are like the size of your head. haha just kidding, but they are huge. and soooo good. but they don't make it up to mudgee so we needed some. And koko samoa is just cocoa, but it's way good. and it also doesnt' make it up to mudgee. You should try to find out if you can get it in salt lake because if you can't, then i'm bringing home a suitcase full of it. haha but really, ask some islanders. 

But that was our mission conference. And while we ate and socialized they played a slide show of pictures of everyone. it was great. I do have heaps of pictures, but once again i have misplaced my SD card reader so i can't upload them. but i will find it or get a new one soon so don't worry. we slept in bathurst again because we didn't have time to drive all the way to mudgee. and then we drove to mudgee tuesday morning. then tuesday night we had our branch party which was fun. We did white elephant and played the name game and watched the "he is the gift" video. Justin came so that was really good. It was funny because Langi Setu was there and he's married to one of the daughters of our members but he and his wife live in sydney because he plays for the Sydney roosters. and he just started talking to justin about religion and im sure he didnt expect to have a religious conversation with a professional rugby player that night! hahaha it was great. then wednesday we took some food baskets around to people that the branch had put together. and we had to be in the flat by 6 and that's when we watched frozen, which was awesome. Then christmas i opened my packages and elder stewart called home in the morning, and we went over to a member family for dinner at like 3 and chilled with them for a while, then went over to another member in the evening. it was great. a very merry christmas. Then i talked to you on friday and we tried to score a nice boxing day sale, but there were literally no stores open. not even woolworths! haha ridiculous. 

all-in-all it was a great week. Hope you all had a wonderful christmas and santa brought you what you wanted. (Zechariah 2:6 i think that's proof enough #ibelieve) haha love you all so much. miss you too! have a great week. 

love,

Elder Tingey