PICTURES!

Koahsiung city at night
Craig with his good friend the "doorman"
Craig overlooking the ocean


Cruising the streets on bike
With companion

Ping Dong Ping Dong

hello family. i am still in ping dong! i love this city and am so glad i get to stay here. my new companion is elder upshaw he is from orem, utah. and has been in taiwan for about a year and a half. so his chinese is pretty good.

i am excited to be able to stay and see these new converts get baptized. really excited. well it was sad to see elder heder go. i really liked elder heder, we got along really well. he is a lot like me, he liked the outdoors and backpacking and stuff like that. and fishing too. so we talked a lot about that stuff. but my new companion seems good too. we are going to do well here in ping dong i think.

after this move i will have spent 4 and a half months here. i know this area like its my home because it is. i will be sad when i have to leave.

this morning i had to go to a funeral for a member in the other branch. she was only about 31. anyways, it was a really sad funeral, it was held in like this warehouse of a place and it was really noisy and just not very good. her family decided to have a traditional taiwanese funeral rather than a christian funeral. it was really sad. especailly because of the environment, it just seemed so hopeless and bleak. i am so grateful for the plan that the Lord has revealed to us in these days. i am glad that we know what happens after death and therefore dont need to fear. it really got me thinking how much of a benefit this knowledge could be to the people of taiwan.

anyways, after the funeral we ran over to the other elders apartment because it was closer and we waited for my new companion to come. i jumped in the shower because i didnt have time to take one this morning. while i was in the shower my district leader i guess decided that my pants needed a washing hahaha actually he didnt realize that they were my pants. so he threw them in the washer and when i got out of the shower we were in a hurry to go get my new companion, but i couldnt find my pants, finally we realized he had put them in the washer. we didnt have any time to so i am sitting here in soaking wet pants hahaha. i feel like i am wearing a diaper or something. the missionary diaper.

well i wont get to email you for another 9 days. i will talk to you then. love ya.

elder anderson

Aug 5, 2008 Email

Well hello everybody. I hear grandpa isn't doing so well. the email that i recieved got chopped in half somewhere along the line. anyways, i hope you are all doing okay. i love ya gramps.

this week was an amazing week! first off, i think i am the luckiest person in the world. i won the Taiwan Lottery. I won 4000 taibi, which is the equivalent to about $150 USD. not to bad eh? the lottery here is different everytime you buy something, all the reciepts have a number on them. so if you save all your reciepts, then at the end of the month you check and see if you won. and i wone. i was only 2 more numbers away from winning a lot more too. its crazy. i am just gonna give the money to the Mission Office though, i would feel weird keeping it.

how crazy is that though? i won the lottery, i won a lot too!

well my new companion he is great. he is from Pleasant Grove, UT. We getting along great, we both love the outdoors and stuff. This is his 7 month on island, so he has been here for about 3 months more than me.

since he is new to the area i get so show him around and introduce him to all of our members and investigators. it is really fun, but a lot of responsibility. because this is my first time being in an area twice in a row. it is my responsibility to know all the streets and places to go and stuff. fun fun fun.

so this sunday we had a really cool experience. we went to a park to go and contact and see if we could talk to anyone there. we werent havent very much luck and were about to leave, but elder heder suggested that we go check out the back of the park. we went to the very back of the park and ran into a member and his friend just out for a walk. his friend was really scared of us at first, but we talked to him and joked with him a little and he warmed up. he then started to tell us how he is scared of white people! i almost laughed, i kept teasing him about it and then i think he realized how ridiculous it was. anyways, he had never really met an american before so we sat down and started talking.

he started talking about how every cultures are to different. i asked him why he thought cultures were so different and he went off about how we all look different and stuff. then i smiled and recited perfectly a chinese proverb that says "All men are brothers." directly translated it means, the 4 oceans are all siblings. in chinese it is "si hai zhinei jei xiongdi." he was a little suprised that we knew this idiom. but then he was like ok so if that is true what does that mean? we were able to teach him all about creation and his member friend bore testimony of it all. then we taught him how to pray and sent him home with a Book Of Mormon. it was so cool! especially because it was a completely unexpected awesome lesson, assisted by a member, in the middle of a public park, in a stinking huge city. i know for a fact that it was not by chance that we came acrossed them.

a cockroach tried to take over my bowl of curry a couple days ago. i laid my curry down for a minute to go get a drink and when i came back there was a cockroach attempting a hostile take over of my delicious bowl of curry. needless to say a battle of epic proportion took place which resulted in the death of my great and noble nemesis. but man was that some good curry. luckily i got to him before he had crawled inside the bowl. all is well, all is well.

love ya,

Elder Anderson

June 25, 2008

hey everybody,

Ping Tung is stinking awesome! It is pretty big and the church members here are awesome. My companion is Elder Chen Wei Yang he is from Central Taiwan and he is awesome. We get along pretty good, occassionally we will come across some cultural differences, but for the most part its all good. He teaches me Chinese, my chinese has gotten so much better in the past 10 days its ridiculous. I feel like i can actually speak chinese now. i can't say everything, but i can always get my point across. Elder Chen has been helping me a lot with just express myself the way i want. i have pronunciation and tones down pretty good, so i will ask him how to say something and then he will tell me. its so convenient because the dictionaries dont have ways to say things they just have words. His english is really good, he has been studying it for 7 years so its way good.

i felt like i was going to get a native companion a couple weeks ago. i just knew i would get one and sure enough i did. i didn't think he would speak such good english, but i am glad he does because he can tell me how to say the chinese equivalent of what i want to say.

ping Tung is huge compared to my last area. they have a big old night market that we go to to contact people and its just awesome.

so yesterday i was riding down the street and i looked over and i saw an indoor swimming pool. and then i saw a bunch of old men sitting around the swimming pool with fishing pools. it was an indoor fish pong. i laughed for like 5 minutes, its was so cute. all these little old men in their lawn chairs, sitting inside an air conditioned building fishing. maybe i have just lived in utah for too long so i am just used to having nature right out the front door, but that doesn't count as fishing. i want to get a picture of it.

speaking of pictures here are a couple. they are all from me and fang liao, but the last one is of my new companion elder chen. he is a goof as i am sure you can tell from the picture. he is a little immmature, but thats because he is only 18. in taiwan since they have mandatory military service, the church will let them go when they are 18, so he is here and is probably one of if not the youngest missionary in the world.

i had to speak in church last sunday. you always have to when you move to a new area. believe it or not i made the congregation laugh, who would have ever thought that i could be funny in chinese. i am not sure if they were laughing at me or with me, but who cares they laughed.

it was really funny in priesthood i got up and introduced myself and the teacher asked me what my name was. my name is Zhang (which is a last name, but their first names are last) and he said "o that is the same as me." so jokingly i told him that "maybe we have the same ancestors." the whole roomed burst into laughter, because obviously my chinese last name has no heritage it is just a name.

anyways thats been my life for the past week. i hope you like the pictures.

the first pick is me picking mangoes, the second is fang liao with the fishing boats and the mountains, the third is the stinking huge spiders we found in the mountains, that no joke were bigger than my head. and just to let you know they are extremely poisonous even the natives are scared of them. one of the members from the fang liao branch took us into the mountains to take pictures of them. and the last picture is of elder chen.

love you all
craig

i own the computers in ping tung, haha :) i can send pictures a lot now so i will try every week.

June 14, 2008 Email

hey everyone,

i totally forgot to tell you about my up coming move. i didn't know where i was moving until 3 days ago, so i wouldnt have been able to tell you about anyways. but it is monday here and i normally email you on wednesday, so it will be 10 days until i can email again.

i just arrived in me new area about 1 hour ago. it is called Ping Tung, its pronounced Ping Dong. wow, its awesome. it is still raining like crazy, but the city is really neat. lots of cool shops and what nots. it is also very clean, which is a welcome change. my last area was really dirty, it had open sewers and stuff, which was really gross. i always teased my last companion that if i got really mad at him i just might push him into it. so there is really much to tell you about my new area because i dont really know it yet.

my new companion is awesome. his name is Chen Wei Yang. and he is taiwanese! but his english is really really good, which should make it really easy. we talk in a mixture of chinese and english, standard chinglish. but he is a way fun guy, i think we are going to get a long great, and i think my chinese is going to improve tons too.

well since i emailed you all earlier there isn't much to tell you about. i packed up all my stuff and moved, i was a little sad to move from my last area because i really started to love the branch, but i am so excited that i have a native companion. i am going to make his ears bleed with chinese language questions.

i have been soaked for the past 3 days. its awesome, i feel like i am swimming. i love the rain, it keeps everything cool. when there is no rain, i get tired really easy because the heat just sucks all the energy out of me. i am definitely a cold weather dweller.

i know this email is early and that i didn't warn you so dont worry about not emailing me this week, it was my fault. i will email you again in 10 days. bye bye love yall

Elder Craig Anderson