Dear People,
龍馬精神!
Dragon Horse Energy! It actually means "I bless you to have the energy of a dragon and the stamina of a horse for this coming New Year", but if the Holy Ghost is coming down in the form of a duck, I can say strange things too, right?
ANYWAYS!
This was a super fun week! We went up to Lok Ma Chau, which I thought might be a HUGE waste of time (an hour by bus each way), but I didn't feel the Holy Spirit telling me not to do it, so I did what every young-twenties guy does and went for it! We ended up (on our way to the lookout where you can see Shenzhen SUPER clearly) bumping into an older gentleman sweeping up firecracker dust (there's buckets of it lying around everywhere right now). Our Mission President had encouraged us to talk less about the Church and just learn about Chinese New Year. We awkwardly started a conversation about Chinese Culture, and he invited us in, introduced us to his wife, told us that he's the Dean of Faculty of the College of Technology at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (the Mission President's old job back at BYU), and then invited us back on Sunday night for a dinner with "50-60 faculty and students"!
You know we went!
It was awesome! We did Chinese BBQ (think BBQ forks, meat balls, fish balls, cocktail weiners, pork chops, sweet potatoes, etc), and then for dinner had what sounds like "Poon Choy". They take a bunch of cooked meats, throw them in a metal bowl, and then, right before serving, boil it so that everything is painfully hot! We had shrimp and clam meat on top of pork and chicken on top of pork skin and mushrooms on top of Daikon Radish, all in a salty peanut-based soup. I'm DEFINITELY going to celebrate Chinese New Year with Poon Choy for the rest of my life!
We chatted with around a dozen people, all of whom were terrified of us at first and then warmed up, including an Australian guy who grew up in a "strict Lutheran town". I'm pretty sure he's here to escape the clutches of Christianity... Ha! You gotta go to Mainland China for that one, boy-o! But he was super nice, and told us how impressed he is with "you guys' language learning program". I wasn't sure how to not sound like a whack-o while telling him it was the Holy Spirit that made it work, so I just told him something like "well, duh, we live and work out here!". Which is also a big part of why we have good language.
That's about it for this week; the work was slow on account of New Year sending everyone to Mainland. I can't blame them, it sounds like an awesome place!
Love,
Elder JE O'Gara
P.S. The nice Chinese Lady in this video taught me Cantonese. She's actually from Hawaii, but she served in Yuen Long years and years and years ago. It's kind of strange to see her here in my record books, not gonna lie.
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