September 4, 2008

Hey Parents! How are you? I am doing way good, i just met my new companion and got to my new area and it is amazing. I'm in a place called suji and it actually is right next to my last area and in the same city but it's all good i'm stoked. My area has a brand new church that is giant and the supposedly the ward is really good too. When i talked to President Burton he said that this ward is the closest one to an American ward in the mission. Ever since the new church building opened last year they have been baptizing people like crazy here so it should be good. My companion's name is Elder Terry and he's from Provo. He seems pretty cool but it's hard to tell the first few days with new comps because you don't really open up to each other for a while. I'm in a four man house now and one of the other missionaries in my house is Korean so that should be pretty interesting. The apartment is pretty ghetto but it should be alright, haha we were super lucky in my last house to have mattresses though i think in every other house in the mission there are just little pads that you put on the floor to sleep on. I'll send a video of the house and the church to Melissa in a week or two so you can see it. Oh yeah another cool thing about this area is that Elder Andersen is my zone leader now! Haha we are both pretty stoked about it and hopefully we will get to go on exchanges with each other this transfer. Hmm other then that i don't have much else to tell you, this past week was pretty uneventful. We did a lot of walking around trying to find people to talk to this week. All the college classes started again this week so we went to 3 different universities but didn't have much luck. I feel bad for Elder Dryden and his new missionary (Elder Dryden is training), they are going to have a heck of a time trying to find new investigators. Street contacting is pretty bad when you don't have people to talk to and i swear i had talked to every person in my whole area in the last 4 months. It definitely will be nice to have a fresh start. Well i don't have much else to report besideds that so i will answer your questions Mom. The temple sessions are in both english and Korean. When we go on p-days with other missionsaries they do the whole session in english because they have all the senior and military couples there as well. When we go with our wards though they do it in korean and we just wear headsets. The mission home is on the other side of Seoul from the temple and it is like an hour subway ride away. The misison home is in Songpa which is the south eastern part of Seoul and the temple is in Shinchon which is the north western part. It'scrazy to walk up to the temple from the main road. You go up this hill with a bunch of random apartments and things and then all of a sudden the temple pops out. Haha in the picture that the church has of the temple they must have done some serious photoshopping because first of all the sky is almost never blue in Seoul and the temple is surrounded by other buildings. As far as the whole bargain shopping thing goes I haven't done a whole lot. Most of the really cheap stuff is in the subway stations and i'm not there all that often so i haven't gotten anything. In Seoul there are huge markets with really cheap stuff two but i haven't been there yet either. I have heard that there are 1 dollar ties at this one subway station though i need to go get some. And about the weather.. The rainy season ended at the beginning of august and then we had the "dog days" which are the hottest 15 days of the year and now it has started to cool off some. It is still pretty hot during the day but it gets really nice at night. Next weekend is Korean's thanksgiving and supposedly after that it will cool off a lot. Well parents my time is running short here so i'm going to wrap this up but thank you for the letters and the prayers. I hope all is going well at home. Can you believe it's already september though?? Christmas is right around the corner! Haha i love you and i'll talk to you next week.

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