They're sending me to Vietnam...it's this whole other country (Week 9)

Xin chào, mọi người! 

P-day has once again snuck up on me! Time has started moving so fast here, it's very weird. By this time next week, I will already be in Vietnam, and I will have a companion I don't even know yet! Sister Luth, Sister Phetsomphou, and I will be separated by Laos and Cambodia. Tragic. 

After church on Sunday we were rather bored and hungry, so we had an impromptu pioneer day celebration—this included bread, jam, beef jerky, a single cinnamon roll split between the seven of us, some lemon heads (100% accurate to the period), and a couple minutes of walking aimlessly around the MTC. We are all going a little insane in here, I think. 

 

Monday marked the beginning of some hard goodbyes! Four of our elders left a week earlier than the rest of the district, and the little testimony meeting we had before they left made a lot of us cry. Before I got to the MTC I was very worried about how things would be with my district because hanging out with 12 guys all the time sounded slightly like a nightmare, but I ended up really loving them. We've been stuck in the MTC together for so long that it's going to be weird to be apart and we are sad to be leaving each other, but we are also so excited to finally be in the field. A quick message for my district: Chị yêu thượng các anh cả! Chị sẽ nhớ gia đình đẹp quá của mình. Các bồ tèo luôn luôn và mãi mãi. Nhưng mà "đôi khi" là gì??? (For those of you who google translate this, please know that google translate makes it sound WAY sappier than I wrote it to be or just translates it slightly wrong, I promise I am not 100% stupid in Vietnamese) 

In which I am not in the same building as an apostle (Week 8)

Xin chào, mọi người!! 

P-days are kind of my most stressful day of the week because it feels like we have no time to actually anything, but không sao! We got to go to the temple this morning, which was lovely. It is always cool to leave the MTC bubble, but weird to walk around Provo as a missionary when I was just living there as a civilian not too long ago! 

On Saturday last week, we had a little gathering with my district and the two Thai districts—technically it was not affiliated with any holiday because that is frowned upon at the MTC and it was not really a party (also frowned upon at the MTC), but we did play games and eat candy and it did happen to be Halloween. What a coincidence. My companion Sister Phetsomphou and my roommate Sister Rogers planned the whole thing and they did a great job; it was a good P-day! 

On Sunday, we had to sprint to our morning leadership meeting in the rain because we left the dorm at 7:41 and had to be there at 7:45, but we were miraculously on time. It was pretty impressive, and I am not sure how we pulled it off because our dorm is not close to that building. After church, Sister Luth and I watched all the behind the scenes videos about the Book of Mormon videos, which healed the documentary sized hole in my heart at least temporarily (guys, I really miss documentaries), and I also discovered that I really like the takis from Trader Joes. This is not pertinent information to anyone reading this but I felt like it needed to be said. 

This week we had three HOAs in English, Thai, and Vietnamese, and they all went really well!! I got an almost perfect score in my Vietnamese one, which was so cool. It is awesome to be able to actually understand people when they speak Vietnamese to me. This only happens some of the time, but like, it is nice when it does. We learned about haggling in class this week, which was quite exciting—fun fact, speaking is apparently way easier for me when I am kind of arguing with someone, but hopefully I find another way to be good at Vietnamese because I probably shouldn't be arguing with people as a missionary. (Or maybe that will be my fun new strategy for missionary work in Vietnam! Very Christlike!)