Sunday, September 15, 2013

First MTC letter 9/13/2013

I've seen a lot of people I know so it's been fun. There are a bunch of people that I know here from BYU. And a couple of people that I met this summer. My companion is my friend from BYU. Her name is Taylor Carter. She's half Chinese and one of our roommates is Chinese American so we have fun comparing Korean to Chinese and Japanese. I liked living with Asians. I'm so excited to go back to Asia. We actually have another sister in our district who is half Chinese. And an elder who is Chinese-American.

 The MTC actually isn't super crowded. They coordinate everyone's schedules so that there isn't a lot of overlapping between zones. I have four sisters in my room and six in my district, and six elders, all going to Seoul South - District J! The West campus is in a group of apartment complexes that the church took over. They have the Asian Missionaries on the main campus.

 The Perringtons are in my branch presidency. Brother Perrington interviewed everyone in my district (we have three new districts who came in on Wednesday). He gave me some advice comparing Japan to Korea.

It feels like I've been here for a week rather than two days. It's so weird. We do so much stuff every day that it feels like each day is three days. I don't know if I'll love it yet or not. I'm glad I'm here but I might get sick of it after 9 weeks.

Time was speeding up before I entered the MTC but now it feels super slow because we're packing so much into one day that it doesn't feel like we could possibly have finished everything we did in one day. We have a tiny bit of personal time but they give us assignments to do during that time. We have to prepare a talk in Korean each week for our branch. And two people can randomly be called up to talk. I'm so glad that I got the Hangul alphabet down before I got here. It's given me a head-start.

We teaching our first (pretend) investigator tonight IN KOREAN! Knowing Japanese had actually been helpful because I translate what I want to say into Japanese first to figure out the sentence structure. But I keep wanting to speak Japanese to my companion when I want to speak Korean. 

We don't have much free time and we spend most of our time in classrooms or in other rooms full of people so it isn't in the comfort zone for introverts. I'm so tired. Sticking to the schedule isn't hard because so many poeple make sure we stick to it. And I have the same schedule as my companion and usually the other people in my district. So I can just follow them. And I know that I'll never catch up on sleep. We get to sleep until 6:30 every morning except our P-days because we have our service project at 6. We got to clean bathroom today. Cleaning the urinals was an especially wonderful treat.

 The cafeteria has a small room full of food for people with food allergies. So when salads are no longer appetizing I can go and find food in there. It's very nice to have. The only problem is that I can eat desserts now. I was counting on desserts being off-limits for me. At least we have 5 hours of exercise a week. hehe

 My classroom is in 7M with the Japanese classrooms and my residency is in 3M on the same floor as the Japanese sisters. So I like to talk to them and sometimes speak to them in Japanese so that they think I'm serving in Japan too. Korean is so cute and fun. Once I got here, a sister took my to my residency to drop off my luggage, took me to pick up my books, and then took me to my classroom where all of the teachers spoke nothing but Korean. all I could do was smile and bow. 

They had us practice teaching discussion to investigators by getting to know them and basing discussions on their needs. They waste no time here in getting down to work. I guess my call letter had a type-o or something because I'll be here until November 8th. Which is comforting because I now have more time to learn Korean. By the way, my mailing address changed form NOV09 to NOV08 but I'm sure it's not a big deal.

 I love you!

 Love, Stout Jamae (I was wrong. Jamae comes after the last name.)

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