First week in Taiwan!!!

早安! (Good morning!)

Weirdly I left the MTC a week ago exactly but have only been in Taiwan for 5 days. The time difference has messed with my head a little but it's getting better!

So when we first got here the APs and Mission President and his wife took us around the area of the Temple where we got lunch. We went on splits with the STLs and ZLs from the nearby areas. It was super fun! But we were all dead by 6pm.

On Thursday we went to the grand hotel to dedicate our mission! It was such a cool experience!We then got our trainers and were sent to our areas. I'm serving in the Bitan area, it's about 30 minutes of the Taipei temple. My trainer is Sister Garner! She's been out for about 9 months, she was Visa waited for a transfer so this is her 5th transfer on the island. Her Chinese is amazing! She's originally from Texas but her family lived in Singapore the last 2 years. That night we had one of our English classes, where we taught our kids Halloween words!

Friday we had our studies in the morning and then we did weekly planning which was like 3 hours so that took up a lot of our time. That night we had a fireside, our area president and one YM general president. It was super good! They talked about finding the elect, and developing faith.

Saturday was a little crazy, we actually had a baptism that morning. His name is 小孟 (xiaomeng), it was the first time I met him but I felt so much love for him. I could feel how happy the Savior was for him, it was such ana amazing experience. After his baptism we went to lunch with him, and 2 ward members. They took us to some Korean place, which was weird but also good. That afternoon our Elders had 2 baptisms so we then went to that. We had a lesson that night with a guy named 高弟兄，it was supposed to go for 30 minutes and went for 1 hour and a half. It went to really deep doctrine and I had no idea what was going on. But that's ok! He agreed to come to church next Sunday so that's super exciting!

Sunday was a tad overwhelming because all of it was in Chinese. The Bishop invited me during Sacrament meeting to bare my testimony, I thought it was good but I don't know if they actually understood me 😂 but something that just touched me heart was a little girl from the ward named liangliang (means bright light) came and showed me her ABC book she was learning. It was such a small thing but it really made my day! That night we had a Recent Convert Fireside. It was super cool because they have some converts who were baptized that month get up and bare their testimony. I didn't understand a lot of what they said but you could feel the spirit so strong!

I'm sorry this week has been crazy and a little overwhelming so I'm sorry if this email is all over the place. Hopefully we will be more put together next week!

Love you all!