Elder Baird's Something About Socks: WEEK 12 HUALIAN: Guess who back? ? ? Back again? ? ? Three hour church back? ? ? Tell your friends ? ? ?

TWO ankl-- um-- Elder Bairds go round the outside, round the outside, round the outside!

I don't miss music by the way.

Well here we are again! It seems like I was just barely writing that kind of sad email that I'm sure some of you read last week. This email won't be nearly that depressing nor spiritual. Why do those two things have to go together. *sigh*

Yes I'm sure a lot of you didn't get the reference I just made, nor the joke inside of it. Nor do I expect anyone really to. I get it, and Roman hopefully gets it. So we good!

(on that note I have been told that there is some confusion going around about my emails. Yes they are cryptic. Yes they are hard to read maybe and don't make sense. Yes there are secret messages that probably only Roman gets. AND yes, Roman is a person. He's my bestie. So all those who were confused about why I kept talking about the super buff cool fighting dudes, I'm not. He's a tall skinny white kid. lol)

Well yes it has been another week and I am doing so much better. And that makes me happy, because not doing good kind of sucks. It's so odd how that works out. Life sometimes. Kinda weird right?

So we ate dinner with some people in our ward and did a lesson with an RC (recent convert) on Monday. I think during that time I ended up saying some real weird stuff and then eating squid balls. Yep. Balls of squid. That was weird. And I think fried octopus? I'm not entirely sure, I decided against asking too many questions.

The next day we went to do another RC lesson. We were going to teach the Law of Chastity and the Word of Wisdom. Which are two very important lessons. Here's the thing though. The person we are teaching is a 94 year old grandma. She don't speak or hear or anything really well. So we tell her all these things she can't do and she's just like, I can't do those, and then laughs a lot. It was a very funny lesson, and they gave us really yummy cookie things! So success!

On Wednesday we were late getting to english class and so we had to stop and pick up food on the way. At the place we were getting food we were talking with the store workers as they made it and they were like, "wow, you're so tall" and I was like yah. Still working on it. And then one of them, I'm pretty sure she was trying to flirt, like walked up to me and was like doing this height comparison thing and it was kinda weird.

Now, ladies at home, I'm about to give you some advice. After my mission once I'm an eligible RM here's a tip. This is probably something you shouldn't say when trying to flirt. Not just to me, but to anyone.

She then proceeded to tell me that I had a tall nose.

(I get it from my mom)

((I'm going to hear it for that comment))

Friday was zone conference! And as part of that we got Thanksgiving dinner! Er.. Lunch! But it was way good! And American, so what could be better than that. Zone conference was also just really great in general. Learned a lot of cool things and came back with this.

Two years is worth it to build the foundation for the rest of your life.

I loved that thought. The elder who said this is leaving this transfer. He was bearing his testimony and was like, "I've always heard missionaries get up here and say 'wow it went by so fast' and I would think, no, this is so long. What are they talking about. Now I'm up here and turns out, I was right. It is long."

It was nice to hear that perspective, that yes it was long, and yes it was hard, but it was worth it for my life. That made me happy to hear!

Which brings me to Sunday where we had 3 hour church!

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Okay annoying font man, calm down a little and let me explain. ((Somebody help me I'm emailing myself again)). So, for the second hour of Church we watched the most recent face to face about the kid and youth program. Which features everyone's favorite currently a senior at Skyridge High School in the Drama department and now super famous, Dustin Poyfair. Wow. What an honor to see his face in Taiwan. He's now a world wide celebrity. Who gave him that gig? Geez.

But yah We watched the whole thing. In Chinglish. Literally it cut in and out of Chinese subtitles to Chinese voiceover to english subtitles and it was just a mess. And the church was freezing. It was kind of a waste of time because no one there understood what was going on for most of it. And it took 2 hours. So yes. Church was three hours. Ugh. It was good I guess? The hard part was we had a Friend there, that is the terminology for an interested person, and we were hoping to have a meeting with him after church, but this just took so long and so I was getting nervous that he wouldn't be able to. In the end he still was able to meet with us and the lesson went real good, so all is well!

It was really funny though. At the end of the face to face they were reciting the Young Women's new theme (shout out to the young men for finally getting a theme they can recite) and the translator just starts losing it. Like she was just starting to cry and it was bad. It starts to get pretty bad as this woman just can't control herself and then all the sudden a new translator cuts in and the mic for the other translator gets shut off. It was really funny TBH.

Another piece of advice, don't drink Taiwanese root beer.

Let's leave it at that.

As well the Taiwanese children are so cute. But they also have no filter. I'm talking to this little 5 year old during english class and she just like runs around to the other side of me and then runs back sits down and proceeds to say "your face has a lot of spots"

Ladies, also probably another good thing not to say.

Well that is about it for today! Hope that yall have fantabulous weeks and know that I love all of you!

Love,

Elder Baird

Something about socks

So I never thought that missionary work would just be detective work. But let me tell you, where I'm at it is. We have about 760 members in our ward. Only 100 show up. That means there are 600 people out there that we know nothing about. So far we have already crossed out about 100 names of people who have moved/are not interested. There are probably about another 200 people who have moved but we don't know. So we just kind of visit these houses and do whatever we can to find out if people live in there or not. Probably some things that would maybe not be legal in America, but it's fun! We do all sorts of things to find out if people live there.

So there was one person, we had the address but no phone number. We went to the address and there was no way to like ring a doorbell or anything. So we looked it up on google maps and we found out that is a used bookstore. It had a phone number. So of course we call it.

Someone answers and we ask if this person lives here. And she's like no, she's gone out. qu guo. Is what she said. So we were like, okay when is she gonna get back? Or did she move. The person on the phone then proceeds to say. She's not coming back. She's kan shan. This means see the mountain. This is when we knew that we had screwed up.

Kan Shan means see the mountain. It is also a euphemism in Chinese to say that someone has died. So yah. We had called this persons daughter... That was awkward...

So yah, I guess we got to mark her off the list. But man we just have no clue about 600 people in our ward which is rough, but like any good detective, we don't give up!