17th email from Hong Kong

Jou Sahn! (Good Morning!)

Every moves, Temple day comes around quicker and quicker. I've enjoyed this moves so much, and my companion, Elder Walgren, is the most charitable person I think I've ever met. I remember Murray Hamilton talking about how he compares companions on a mission to the Telestial, Terrestrial and Celestial Kingdoms - Elder Walgren is certainly a Celestial companion! I keep telling him off for buying me chocolate and trying to give me all of his things he doesn't need! So time has just flown by, and even though this moves is an extra week long (because of Christmas, they changed moves day so that the new missionaries weren't on the plane of Christmas day!) it's really gone so fast!

We're emailing first thing this week, before heading off to the Temple. I'm really looking forward to it. Even though it feels like a really short time since I last had a Temple Day, it feels like it's been ages since I actually went through the Temple. Does that make sense? I'm really looking forward to the spiritual uplifting that Temple attendance always gives.

My Hayfever is no longer the problem it was; I think I was just allergic to something in the apartment; we got some fancy Andrex toilet paper that smelled of something fun, and just drove my nose nuts. Thankfully, we're now using the cheapest stuff available (about 2 pounds for 30 rolls!) and it's absolutely fine.

It's so interesting to hear that Annie Liu is going to Sydney! You'll have to find out if it's North or South Sydney. My MTC companion, Elder Dallin, is in Sydney South, while an Elder in the District below us in the MTC is in Sydney North.

Charlie's call seems to be taking a while to come back. I'm fairly certain that the longer a call takes to get to Reading Stake, the further away the call is. That only applies to Reading, though my MTC companion, being from Utah, got his back in 4 days!

Just to let you know, yes, the calendars got here fine. Elder Alspaugh didn't quite have the self-control to fathom the idea of only eating one chocolate a day, so he ate most of his on the first day we got them (the 8th of December). Then he ate the rest on the 15th.

I went on 24 hour exchanges this past week with Elder Holbrook - a Mandarin speaking Elder. It was very interesting, being the best Cantonese speaker in a companionship for once - there were a few times out finding when I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but for the most part I actually did quite well. Taught a lot of University students in English, though, so can't get too excited about my Cantonese.

With Leeds appearing to be pretty tricky, I guess BYU will probably be a more Missionary-friendly University. I'm somewhat in two minds about whether I'd prefer to study in Britain or USA - I'll certainly miss home a lot, especially after already having been away for two years, but on the other hand, with the way the US University system is set out, from what I've heard, I could take classes on a wide range of subjects, not just Mandarin, and so could study English Literature, creative writing, even computer animation (there's another Elder here, Elder Hamon, who wants to study that at BYU - his drawings are amazing!), but it all seems so complicated! I don't know how to go about sorting through everything, even with the help of a lot of other Elders who've done it themselves before. I'll need to pray sincerely about how to act.

At the encouragement of Elder Hamon and others, I'm looking into starting a drawing class to try and find people to teach. West Point is a little dry at the moment, and all we seem to do is go out and find miracles - but none of them speak Cantonese and live in our area. Either they're from Mainland and speak Mandarin, or they speak Tagalog, or Filipino, or English, or they just work on Hong Kong island and live elsewhere. So hopefully with something like a drawing class, we can attract people that we can teach. Elder Hamon's apparently been having great success with that, but then, he's a simply amazing artist. I don't really feel up to the standard to be able to teach. There'll probably be a lot of people more advanced than myself in the class - there's a kid in the ward, Rocky (Chinese name Lohk Kei) who is simply amazing, who we'd like to use for fellowshipping in the class, but he's by far better at drawing than I am. So we'll see how things go.

Speaking of things that are going - we have to go. Temple time is coming up shortly, and we have to get across a lot of Hong Kong to reach the Temple. Speak to you next week, and hope some post's waiting for me at the Temple! :P

Elder Matthew Loffhagen