Exchanges Exchanges Exchanges

Leihdeih hou!
This week was good. Lots of exchanges, as you can see. As STLs, we KNOW that we're supposed to do exchanges with every single companionship every single transfer, but somehow they always still end up getting shoved into one week near the end of the transfer?? I don't know how that works out. But anyways, this week I was on exhanges with Sister Liang and then with Sister Atzback a day or so later. Both lots of fun. It's so fun to get to know the other missionaries and so fun to see some new areas. :)
This week I also had the privilege (with Sister Atzbach) of having an older woman come up to us while we were talking to a high school girl on the street and scream in our faces that we're a cult and then scream to everyone in the vicinity to be careful of us (tiny, harmless, 19 and 20 year old girls). We tried to act as Jesus would and not as we would have liked to, haha. Reminds me of that scripture in Acts where the apostles are getting yelled at by the Sanhedrin and when they leave they're so happy that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for Christ's name.
We also got to visit lots of sweet members, and oh man do I love them. Hong Kong has my heart and soul.
Life is so good here! It's hard, but it's good. Keep sharing the gospel and loving the missionaries--they gave up more than you realize to be there in your ward with you.
Love you all, thanks for all the support from each of you! Gayauh!
Sister Wasden
郭姊妹

Pics:
Lots and lots of selfies. Better pictures to come next week, so sorry.

This Week in HK :)

Leihdeih hou!
This week has been good! And long. We are so so so tired.
A few highlights:
Last week for pday we went to Central and took a ride on the ferris wheel! Pretty views and lots of good friends. :)
Sister Kimball left us for Macau. :(
We had our mission conference! Elder Stevenson (as well as a few others) came and spoke to us about the power of repentance and it was so so good.
We FINALLY got a new investigator! Our first for this month (our goal was 12, which is twice the amount that I've ever gotten in a single month before). She's GOLDEN. And she lives out of our area, so we'll probably be turning her over soon. As it goes.
Someone told me that I could try to speak in English if that would help me express myself better. That felt good.
We met with one of the Sha Tin recent converts, Cheng Pohpo! She's so sweet, and only kind of an RC? She was found on the street by missionaries and baptized later, and THEN they found out that she was actually a less active from another ward and she couldn't remember being baptized. So she was baptized twice, haha! Doubly clean. She's so sweet though, and it was really fun. :)
We had lots of meals with members in the Sha Tin ward. It's so fun to get to know new people, and I'm looking forward to continuing the work here.
Keep the faith, folks. God is good. :)
Love you all! Gayauh!
Sister Wasden
郭姊妹

Pics:
1. Ferris wheel fun (check out the view behind us)
2. Love these girls
3. Gorgeous Central
4. MTC reunion at mission conference!

Sangyaht Faailohk

Leihdeih hou!
This week has been really good! Again, not too much time today, so here's another highlights reel for your entertainment:
1. All of the missionaries had to give talks in church yesterday in the Sha Tin ward. Turns out I don't like giving talks in Cantonese any better than I do in English. I talked about how the Book of Mormon can help members do missionary work. The Book of Mormon is really really important everyone. Make sure you're reading it and sharing it. :)
2. Sister Risenmay's birthday is today! For her birthday celebration we're going to go hear Elder Stevenson from the Quorum of the Twelve speak to all the HK missionaries. We're pretty excited. :)
3. On Saturday, we got a nice surprise emergency moves calls from the APs: Sister Kimball is going to Macau! TODAY. It was really short notice so we've been doing lots of packing (and a little bit of pouting). We've started really loving trio life and we're so sad it only lasted 2.5 weeks! Also Sister Risenmay and I will still be covering both Sha Tin and Tai Wai and we have no idea how we'll get around Sha Tin without Sister Kimball's help. Hopefully this is the closest I'll ever have to get to whitewashing an area. We'll be calling the elders for directions a lot, probably.
4. Oh yeah, I'm 20 now! Thanks everyone for all the birthday wishes, they really made my whole week! I feel so blessed to have so much love and support from all of you, and I'm so grateful for each of you! To party (last p-day) we met up with a bunch of other sisters and headed to the Cheesecake Factory. It was hard to find, expensive (really actually just American prices), and so much fun! A great way to party.
5. Oh yeah, while we were out finding on my birthday, I got hit on by a 16 year old (as opposed to the usual old men). Nothing to make you feel like you finally beat your teenage years like teenagers flirting with you. Adulthood is weird.
6. While at a less active's house, I made a cat friend! Not gonna lie, this was one of the highlights of my week.
7. We also sent a postcard to General Mills. This is because we really do love cereal, not because we're hoping they'll send us cereal in return (although that would be nice). When you're a missionary, you gotta find ways to keep entertained, you know?
Anyways. Life is good! I feel like as soon as you get comfortable and start to feel like you know what you're doing, things change on you, but that's how you keep growing. That's definitely what's been happening to me over here in Hong Kong for the past nine months! But if you keep Christ at the center of your life, He'll keep you balanced, every time.
Thanks for all the love and support! Have a good week!
Gayauh!
Sister Wasden
郭姊妹

Pics:
1. Am I going to declare this cat the new third member of our trio? Maybe.
2. Birthdays and artsy trees
3. The tripanionship. We'll miss this.
4. A dramatic send off of our postcard

Summer is Coming

Busy is good. Some brief highlights from the week for your entertainment:

1. We went finding a ton! Which is hard, but we're all getting a lot better at it, which makes it a lot more fun. One high school girl told me she thought I was 35, which did great things for me. We also ran into a group of Mainlanders, and as usual, as soon as we started speaking Cantonese to them, they all busted out their phones and started taking pictures and videos with us. Me, being a good little missionary, made sure the Book of Mormon that was in my hands was clearly prominent in every picture they had with me. Maybe you'll see some of those pictures floating around the internet or something. If you do, send them my way. ;)

2. We had lots of meals with members in Sha Tin this week (and a few in Tai Wai), and I have never eaten so much with members in my life. I love it though, and I love getting to know all the cute people in Sha Tin! I haven't had to get to know a new ward since I first came to the Tai Wai ward as a baby missionary, so it's been really fun to do it again, except this time I can actually talk to people and don't want to cry every time someone speaks in Chinese to me. It's great. :)

3. To make our week even more interesting, we went on splits with the Mandarin sisters this week! The Mandos cover seven wards, so sometimes when they have investigators going to different wards, they have to split up. It was so fun though, and I love love love hearing people speak Mandarin. It sounds way more like I expected Chinese to sound than Cantonese ever did, so that's really fun. Sister Anderson (the Mando) and I even managed to have a successful conversation on the train, half in Mandarin and half in Cantonese, even though neither of us can speak the other language. So cool! Our poor wards were so confused though--last week was our first week as a trio, and it took SO MUCH EXPLAINING to clear up all the confusion of how there's now three sisters covering two wards, so showing up one week later with a fourth sister who now only speaks Mandarin about broke their minds.

4. This week we found out the President Nelson and Elder Holland will be visiting Hong Kong this April and we couldn't be more excited!!

5. Also, the humidity is creeping back into our lives. We're starting to feel really sticky 24/7 again. If you leave anything cold out, it's immediately dripping wet on the outside. Summer is approaching. Most of all, it just SMELLS humid. It smells like Hong Kong again. It's throwing me back to my baby missionary days a lot, actually. I got here literally one week before the worst part of the Hong Kong summer, and Sister Kimball arrived soon after, so we've been enjoying telling Sister Risenmay (who got here in the wintertime) horror stories about heat and humidity. Not going to lie, I don't think I'm quite ready to let the nice cool weather go yet, but at least in a few weeks we'll be allowed to have air conditioning again! All part of the fun. :)

That's pretty much it this week! We've had a lot of really cool lessons and experiences about the temple this week, so here's a friendly reminder: the temple is really special and really really important and actually kind of the coolest thing. Don't you ever take it for granted.

Love you all so so so much! Thanks for all the love! Enjoy your nice dry, cool air for me.

Gayauh!

Sister Wasden

郭姊妹

Pics:

I'd like to apologize, I've been living so close to this gorgous river for 7 months and haven't really sent that many pictures of it home, so here's a few. The really really bright light in the background of the dark picture is the horseracing track, which they used in the 2008 Olympics. :)

Trio goals: the fat ballerinas in the Choi Hung subway station