Subject: Week Two in Vietnam!
Hello everyone!
I have now officially made it through two weeks in Vietnam. Vietnam really is such an exciting place! There is so much going on! I think I already brought up how crazy the traffic is last week, but I am happy to report that this week, I am a lot more used to it. The main thing to know if you bike here is that you have to be really assertive, you rarely stop and wait for someone else, just try to stay in constant motion.
Besides that, I have also been enjoying the food here, at least mostly... The things I have found that I don't like consist of frogs (too many bones), snail (too hard to chew), and duck stomach and liver (which don't taste bad, but have a really weird texture, especially the duck liver which felt like rubber and stuck to my teeth). The rest of the food here has been good though! And I can now say I have eaten bamboo! It was in some sort of soup I ate. I will include a picture of it in this email.
Well, let's get to some more spiritual stuff. I am continuing to teach both members and investigators about the church. My companion and I currently have three investigators, and I met one for the first time this week. He is super cool, he has only had the first two lessons and is already talking about wanting to be baptized and go on a mission. Now obviously there are no guarantees, but if it does happen, then it really is evidence of how the Lord prepares people to be ready to receive the word. This investigator has only known about the church for one month, and is already thinking of serving a two year mission! Seriously, I think that is so cool that someone could even consider that in such a short time.
Well, lessons in general are going well. I think the people we teach understand me pretty well, even if I can't understand them. My companion though is really good at the language and is able to respond to their questions well, and occasionally explains to me what they said so I can respond as well. The language is coming along. I have learned that the one of the hardest parts of the language for me is the letter t and d. To me, they sound the exact same! So I really have to work on differentiating the two, especially when I speak. Tones are also tough, but I have been making progress with that.
I guess I should mention a bit about the normal routine here. We have a few hours of study every day, both of the gospel and of the language. This is one of a few missions where you get to nap in the day. We also get up an hour earlier, but the nap really helps break up the day. Obviously we get three meals a day. Usually breakfast is in the apartment, and the other two depend on the day, but we eat out a lot. Then we have appointments with either investigators, or members, or have class. And, with any remaining time, we go contacting. I don't know how many of you are aware of this, but we aren't allowed to go door knocking in this mission, so our main source of contacting is riding the bus and just talking with people on the bus. Speaking of buses, they really pack buses sometimes. This only happened to me once, but I swear I was on a bus with about eighty other human beings! It was really packed! It turned out fine though.
I guess something else to talk about would be self reliance class. I think I mentioned previously how it was cool that it could be more religious based since it wasn't English class. Our last lesson was literally "Learning by the Spirit". Well, we get to teach in English, which I love! And we do cool activities with them. This week Elder Smith (the other American elder in my branch) and I taught the students how to do the human knot. They really enjoyed it. We related it to the lesson by directing the one group and leaving the other to figure it out themselves. Of course the guided group solved it much faster. Then we had them discuss in English the importance of having a guide, and then related that to the Holy Ghost. I actually really enjoy teaching the class.Elder Watson/ Nghiem
P.S. Below are photos of the soup mentioned above, Hanoi's thousand year old tree, me on a random bridge, and a machine used to make silk products that I saw in the silk village I went to last week for P Day.
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