Elder Wells is in Korea - Crazy!

Oct. 20, 2008

Holy Korea

wow this last week was the most packed, exciting, awesome, confusing, entertaining, random, awkward, and craziest week of my entire life. lets start from the beginning:

13 hour plane ride: flew over alaska and russia (or kamkatcha if you play risk.) and japan. that was awesome. i thought we were going to fly over part of china and north korea because thats what the tv showed but we veered far away from them. probably a good idea. anyways it was a very long flight. got in late at night then
Wednesday morning 5:30 am we went to the mogyoketan aka korean bath house. if you have never heard of a korea bath house, i will be blunt. its a huge hotel with a bunch of 3 foot pools where a billion koreans hang out naked. ya its wierd. but very relaxing. oh and one pool is like 4 feet deep and is for swimming so i got to go swimming on my mission. so while we were hanging out near the hot tub (we werent naked at this moment in time) an old man comes up (hes naked) and asks if we are the missionaries. so an elder got his phone number. the reason i tell this story is because the first refferal i ever saw in korea and the investigator was naked. weird. ok so next, we went proselyting at pusan college and then had a scavenger hunt where we had to take pictures of stuff and buy squid from one of the street venders, it was cool. then we had a testimony meeting that night and got our companions.
my companion: yup hes korean. his name is elder lee or just e tay wee in korean. he is awesome. we live alone in a little appartment which i was scared about because i didnt think he would know much english but he does. and he knows funny english (words like pimp and stuff, hes great). he is really funny. to be honest i dont understand a word he says in korean. i dont know korean. i would be freaking out about it but all of the older elders tell me that it was the same for them and it just takes time to be able to break up the words and define them because they speak soooo fast.
ok what else...my first minor injury: you know how doors have a push or pull sign on them to know whether to push or pull them in. well they have them in korea but they are in korean..so i tried to push a door open and ran right into it. it was funny. and it didnt hurt or anything.
my mission president and his wife are great. they are really funny. i like them a lot. my area is right next to the mission home so they were in church with us.
the food is actually really good. but i havent had enough of it to have somethign i didnt like. we eat really random stuff too. haha like saturday we had tuna sandwiches for breakfast, chinese food for lunch and spaghetti for dinner. it was weird. but i like korean food. oh except, lets just say that i had to look up the word for diarrhea already..
my area is really really tough. we are whitewashing the area which means that we are both new to it and we have no investigators..its miserable. we proselyte all day everyday. the only thing i hve done besides proselyte was a service project which was soo funny. we volunteered to serve food to a group of old people. it was put on my a buddhist chruch. so we served food to about 150 grandmas and grandpas. they are soo funny. seriously. they are all tiny and their clothes look like they got them from grandma tressie. the grandmas all walk around everywehre with little bags or the cart things in all the asian movies. its great. and sometimes they hunch over and start running. haha i love it. after teh service we ate the food we were serving wich was teh most disgusting food ive ever had. it was kimchi rice and soup. the kimchi and rice wasnt bad but the soup tasted like horse sweat, seriously.
the fashion here is hilarious. i dont have time to explain but people wear the weirdest stuff.
today pday was awwwesooommmeee. we took a bus down to the beach and played sand football with 12 other elders, it was the most fun ive had in 3 months. i also saw the most amazing fireworks on saturday night. it was some celebration. way better than american fireworks. i wish i would have had my camera..
i dotn have time to explain more.
i dont really need anything so dont worry about sending stuff. i will make a list. but when you do, send sweedish fish. my companion looves them. haha in his korean accent he says : soo delicious. its funny. i wish you could hear.

everything is going great. the work is hard but definately worth it.

Love elder Wells