Memorial Week 耶穌收難紀念的禮拜

(A busy time of year!)

As you guys know, this last week was the final week before the annual Memorial of Christ's death, which here in Taiwan happened last night. That in itself makes pioneers very busy, as we try to finish our entire territory before the event, not like that happens often. But besides that, I have a very big test- the concluding test for my scholarship, called the TOCFL- on May 3rd, and we've just started studying for it in addition to my regular classes.

So needless to say my free time has been very restricted this last week! However, that doesn't mean we couldn't fit anything in...

Last Monday, Cameron and Michelle Farrell, originally from Reno NV of all places, invited a bunch of us over to show us their pictures from the Myanmar Int'l Convention last year. I already heard a little about it when Adam and Drew flew through Taipei on their way home from it, but hearing again how all those thousands of our brothers and sisters literally sold everything they had and trekked for months in some cases to show their hospitality to the international crowd coming in... they really do live in a different world. (Also, I'm told that the branch paid for their trips back home if they arrived in Yangon and ended up being stuck there.)

Besides pictures, they brought these back!

So yeah, we totally tried on skirts traditional male men's manly clothing from Myanmar. It's actually quite interesting how they tie the things on- essentially they're a huge ring of fabric that you step into, you just pull the sides so the front is tight against you, then quickly snap your arms inwards and tuck the resulting ball of fabric into your waist. The idea is you'll have a perfect V shape of folded fabric in front of your legs, which makes it easy to walk and run and also makes the... okay, skirt, look like it's actually a man's item of clothing.

And there were girls there too, it's not like a bunch of guys just decided to meet up and try on skirts or anything.

They also told us about a city in Myanmar called Mandalay, a city of about 1.5 million people- 800,000 of whom are Chinese-speaking! It turns out that for whatever reason Mandalay is an incredibly popular place for Mainland Chinese to immigrate to, but despite the large number of there there are only two Chinese-speaking Witnesses assigned to the city. Just goes to show that, just like Brian Chow in Rwanda (link to his blog, by the way), you really can use Chinese anywhere, because Chinese people are all over the world.

And now, for some pictures of the preaching work!

Both in the day...

And at night, we go!

This invitation campaign is always like a vacation from "serious" work. There are always big groups out, you have a very easy presentation, it's a special event so it's a bit easier to get people asking questions than usual, and you have a clear goal at the end. What's not to like? Although we didn't get our territory done, we did run out of invitations, which is almost as good. (We had 14,000 invitations to place but 150,000 people in our territory- this was the desired outcome :-) )

Later in the week, our Korean friend Hyunjit (very hard to transliterate and to say for that matter- his Chinese name is Li Xianzhi) had a good idea- let's everyone go to Daan Park and have a picnic!

Hooray picnic!

Taiwan is really nice because there's no public drinking laws- you can totally walk down the street drinking a beer if you want to, and I have a couple times. Of course, they're pretty strict on public drunkenness, but oddly that isn't too big of a problem. So we brought a bunch of food, chicken and chips and fruit and such, and a couple beers each and had a nice evening!

My mom always asks me to post more pictures that have me in them, so here you go mom! :-)

People in this picture from the top left, clockwise: Chihiro, me, Ginger, Hyunjit, Felicia, Aika. It was actually pretty funny how we managed to communicate- there were quite a few newly arrived people at the picnic, some of whom really couldn't speak Chinese well, so for example they would all speak in Korean to the Korean person who spoke the best Chinese, who would then translate it for the group! But, you know, we're all making progress. Taiwan is a great place to learn Chinese quickly!

After we'd hung out and chatted for an hour or two, we decided to play Ninja.

Ninjaaaa

Ninja is a game where you all strike a pose, then starting with whoever won last round (or arbitrarily) make one move. The idea is to hit people's arms- if your arm is hit, you can't use it, and if you lose both you're out. However, you have to start from wherever you ended your last move, so if you tried to hit someone and they dodged out of the way, and now you're in a deep lunge facing the wrong way- well, stay like that, and next turn you start from there and try to hit someone else. It's a lot of fun, and although it's stereotypical the Japanese friends are way better at it than the rest of us! I still won one match though, after like a fifteen minute duel with Chihiro. Victory! (She said I cheated because I have long arms, which might be true but doesn't mean I didn't win! :-D)

I'm not going to give this picture context... it just is.

Later, on Friday morning we had a new pair of missionaries move into the home on top of our Kingdom Hall. Considering we're in the process of selling it I'm not really sure why they're moving in now, but I guess the branch doesn't want to waste the space... in any case, I went over on Friday to help them move in.

Stuff has arrived!

I don't have any pictures of them unfortunately, but they're a Korean brother and sister who will be serving the Indonesian group attached to the Wenshan congregation. They were very excited to start their new assignment, and I wish them the best!

Sunday evening, Giancarlo and his fiancee Sara invited us all to go to Danshui for the afternoon, which I gladly agreed to. The weather was beautiful- about 85 degrees, wind coming off the ocean, humid but not unbearable.

Just arrived, making plans

We didn't really do much of anything- strolled around, looked at stuff, bought some fried squid.

It is indeed fried squid!

One of the sisters in our congregation, Rebecca, had a hilarious encounter with a Turkish ice cream vendor- she ordered ice cream and he basically messed with her the whole time, giving her her ice cream then pulling away the ice cream leaving her with a cone, keeping it just out of reach- I have a video but it's 50MB, way to big to post! If you want to see it and you have my email address, send me an email and I will send you a link :-)

After a while we found ourselves at this really nice old building from the Dutch colonial days that is now a coffee shop!

It's called "Red Castle Coffee"! 

So we chilled there for a while, but they have very odd rules- apparently they will not serve you until everyone in your party has ordered something, but not everyone in our group wanted something. I get that the building is probably expensive and they need to make sure the people visiting are actually customers and not just tourists, but it's not like there was a line of people we were preventing from sitting down, and by not allowing the people who wanted coffee to get coffee you're actually getting less money that you would have.

Well, whatever- weird business practices aside, it was nice!

And then of course, the Memorial itself. I haven't heard the total attendance- we split up into two times, because there would be just too many people to all fit- but my half had 202 attending, which is great! If we split evenly, that means that ~90 Witnesses and ~110 guests came! I was picked to be a server, which is always a nice privilege. 

Personally, one of my classmates who I invited came, which is awesome. His Chinese isn't good enough to get everything from the talk, but I made sure he sat next to a Japanese-speaking brother who could help explain things to him.

Thanks for coming Tatsu! I'm afraid he was a bit intimidated by all the people though...

He agreed to go over the "Good news from God" brochure- I'm going to give him one in Japanese, I'll use Chinese, and hopefully we'll be able to work this out!

Afterwards, we all went out to eat at Saizeriya, everyone's favorite Japanese-Italian restaurant.

Too many people for me to get a clear shot!

Naturally, because it was a special event, everyone dressed up in their nicest clothes, which led to pictures like this:

It's a shame there really isn't an equivalent to qipao for men...

If there's one thing I regret about my choice of language groups, it's that I don't get to wear cool ethnic clothes to assemblies and such. There are such things as traditional Chinese clothes I can wear of course, but in Chinese culture nowadays they're seen as relaxing clothes, not formal dress like Qipao dresses. Ah well, worse things have happened...

And here's an unrelated picture:

This is what happens when you ask Nikolai and Yang Jie to pose

So that's it for this week! How was your Memorial campaign?