Chiang Mai

Well another week has gone by in Thailand. It is still great here I really like being here and being able to experience a new culture. Everything is going really well and we are starting to find people to teach. The area was kind of empty because it was just opened so there are a few recent converts that lived out in our area but not that much else. It is cool sometimes when we go out and when we go down a new street we can say we were the first missionaries to talk to people there. We do a lot of biking, which I really enjoy. I got a pretty nice bike; hopefully it will survive my riding several miles every day for the next 20 months. 

We had an interesting day on Friday. The Zone Leaders called us the night before and told us to go with a group of people to Chiang Mai University. What was going on was that students from Weber State in Utah were visiting and I think our purpose there was to be translators. So we ended up spending the whole day at the University.  Afterwards we went to these gardens, it was really nice there and they paid for us to get into stuff and also paid for our food. We got to talk to a lot of people and recruited a lot of the students there that want to come to the English class we do every week. They were all really nice. It was funny because it was a University from Utah and like half of the people in the group were LDS. They were all Computer Science people so they were helping the University improve things like their website. I didn't really have to do any translating because Elder Parish’s Thai is way better than mine. The only translating I did was helping people order food. It was still a good day.

We have to do a lot of biking because our area is really big; we have to do a lot of long rides to get to all of our investigators.  I don’t mind riding because I get to see all of the scenery. There are a lot of rice fields and lots of green.

I have been surprised with my food eating trends since I got on my mission.  I really don't struggle with cheese anymore. I have had a lot of time were I had cheesy stuff in California. I still will get like hamburgers without cheese, if I have the choice, but it’s no big deal if I get it. Cream Cheese still isn't the best. Yesterday a member gave me a huge piece of cheese cake after church and I just had to eat it. Some of the Thai stuff is worse than cream cheese, somehow, but I can get stuff down when I need to. I also have to drink a lot of soda here. Since the tap water isn't good, soda and other manufactured beverages are pretty big here.  They give me stomach aches but I manage. The people in the branch are great. They like to talk to the missionaries, so I always learn new stuff when I talk to them. It is funny, we have this one member in our branch that wants to go serve a mission and is like 25 already so he has to leave soon but the law here is that he needs to serve 1 year in the army before they are 26.  So he is having problems. He is currently trying to gain enough weight to disqualify him from service. He only needs to put on like 3 more kilos. I haven't seen any elephants yet. I was over by some the other day but we didn't see any of them. The broadcast for the 50th anniversary of the missionary work in Thailand is this Sunday. It will be fun.  Elder Stevenson is coming. It will be in Bangkok so we will just see it via Broadcast.

 

-- Elder Cheney

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