Week 5

Hello Family and Friends! Life here in the MTC is fabulous! It's going by so quickly. I can't believe it's day 36/60 already. My district has become my new family here and we had some pretty fun moments together here. My mom sent us a cake to celebrate the half way day in the MTC (which she actually miscalculated but we were all still extremely grateful for) and we devoured it. Hahaha we took some time out of our language study and all got together at a table outside to eat this glorious cake. It was a little chilly and a little windy but it was definitely worth it. I don't know what was in that cake but I think it was a good moral boost for everyone in the District even more than a physical one since we've all become a little... desensitized to the cafeteria food. It's not bad food, but it's all just mass produced and it tastes like it. It's kinda like eating at Golden Coral every day. It's good once in a while, but not so much for 3 meals a day every day for a few months. Anyways, we started by taking pictures (yes Mama I've been trying hard to take pictures and I'm going to send them home this week) We have all of these pretty nice pictures of us being friends and stuff and we have this pretty little cake with us and it's all nice. Then I tried to cut the cake (It had a Carmel layer on the top and all I had to cut with was a plastic knife and since it was a little chilly the caramel layer on the top of the cake got kinda hard) I told the district that if they wanted to eat the cake they had to follow the Chun tradition which is to scream as loud as possible from the moment the knife hits the top of the cake to the moment it touches the bottom. It never touched the bottom. Haha I started "cutting" and the plastic knife just went into the cake and the caramel wrapped around it and got sucked into the cake. Then the knife I was using broke and actually cut my finger and I started bleeding. After this, we just decided that we're close enough like family and since nobody's a germophob we just took the forks and dug into the cake. After 30 seconds, a good 60% of the cake was gone. Haha then we ended up not finishing, we had about one to two servings of cake left, but either way we had a lot of fun and really came together. So with this I'd also like to thank Mama for the amazing cake. It tasted wonderful and it really did lift everyone's spirits. We spent at least 20 minutes after eating just laughing. About 15 minutes of which we were just laughing at eachother's laughs. There are some seriously strange laughs in our district. One of which is mine... I have a higher laugh than all of the sisters but one, and her's is tied with mine. Haha

This week one of my teachers also got engaged. He's a character and a half too. My companion and the other Elders in my district have been really into pokemon lately and they've been putting a pokemon to everyone and the teacher who just got engaged is a squirtle. Haha he looks really scrawny and skinny, but he's always semi-hyper. Really happy guy and a really funny guy, he just told us his entire engagement story yesterday though. It was... in Russian. Haha He told us the story in russian, but he did enough with the hand motions and made sure to define all of the vocabulary we wouldn't know so I did understand the story. Apparently he took this lady up to a pretty hill after a stressful dinner because the ring wasn't finished until halfway through dinner. Then he was almost found out because they were supposed to be kinda meandering in the car but he knew where he was going, he had a lot of people helping him and one of them caught on fire and another almost caught the building on fire. But in the end it ended up being him standing on the hill with this girl looking up at the sky filled with paper lanterns like in Tangled and he quoted the movie by saying "(Insert lady's name here) you are my new dream." How precious. Then he made a connection to the Gospel about how he had everything planned out but it didn't all go according to plan but it did end up better than anything. So that's kinda like missionary work. We can plan all we want, it's not going to go the way we want it to, but it'll turn out for the best anyways because "The works and designs of God cannot be frustrated." D&C 3:1 I think... not sure. He didn't share that in the lesson. That's just something I stumbled on earlier that was cool.

Yesterday we had Elder Oaks come and speak to us. He talked about the Gift of the Holy Ghost and how important the partaking of the sacrament is to having that in our lives. He quoted president Ezra Taft Benson and said, "The Gift of the Holy Ghost is the greatest gift we can receive in mortality." Then went on later to say, "We all have the right to the companionship of the Holy Ghost but the privilege of the companionship of the Holy Ghost is dependant on our worthiness." (That was paraphrased I have no idea exactly what he said) but that was my favorite thing he said. When an apostle of the Lord speaks it's just amazing because you can feel the weight of the mantle on their voices and you can see the joy of the service in their countenances. I love being able to listen to the apostles speak. This next week is General Conference and the MTC choir is going to be able to sing in some of the sessions. I'm not going to be in it but the sisters in my district are. I didn't know that was coming up or I would have done it. I've been taking naps during choir practice. Haha

Well things are going great! Thank you for all of the prayers and love! Thanks for all those who have been writing letters and I hope to hear from the rest of you soon!

- Elder Chun