Another one flew by!

It was great to hear from Sister George again this week!  She will be singing in the choir for the General Relief Society Broadcast this coming Saturday night, so keep an eye out for her in the soprano section!  :)  Here are excerpts from her letter today:

September 23, 2013

Hi Mom and Dad!

Well this week's been good too! Haha, another one that just flew by. I think we hit Friday and were like, "Wait, it's already Friday again?" And we get our travel plans this Friday I think, so it's super exciting! It's crazy, I have like 2 weeks and a day, I'm so excited to get there.   

I actually ran into Tiffany Pao yesterday, from Shanghai Youth Conference. She just got here this past week, going to Minnesota, so that was crazy. It was fun to see yet another friend from Shanghai, haha.

Well this week's been good as usual! Haha, um, let's see some of the biggest things that happened:

 1. We got our Chinese name tags on Thursday!!! Haha, it was so exciting! It's like a medal around here, you know you're leaving soon when you get your tag. So I took a picture of that, and 2 of me wearing it because I couldn't really wait. I love it, haha. In about 2 weeks I'll be able to wear them!

Top line is 'Qiao Jie Mei', or Sister George. 2nd and 3rd lines
are 'The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints'

Sister George sporting her Chinese name tag she will
begin wearing in just a few short weeks!

 

2. I got selected to be a part of the choir for the General Relief Society broadcast! It's kind of crazy because it's really not a big choir at all, like 350 sisters max I think. So we've been doing choir practice for like an hour and a half every single morning, and the music is actually really cool. I'm also super excited to be going to Salt Lake City this Saturday, even if it's just a little field trip, it'll be way fun. I'm not sure when we leave Saturday or get back or anything, but I'm excited :)

3. My companions and I are now the new Sister Training Leaders for the zone until we leave, so that's cool. We really honestly hardly do anything, but when new missionaries come in (October 2) we get to the give the sisters a tour, and we have to go to lots of meetings on Sunday to make sure everything is going well, and yeah, so that's cool. My entire district will be some of the missionaries there to welcome the new missionaries and help them carry all their stuff and show them around and stuff. It'll be fun, we're excited.

Amie's MTC District

 

Yeah, that's pretty much all the super exciting stuff that's happened. It was kinda fun though, I had an interview with my teacher, Jiang LaoShi, where she just wanted to get to know us better and see how we were doing and stuff, and she was super nice! She said she really appreciated how I had been helping the district, with like giving teaching pointers and helping with any of their Chinese questions, and she also said that I was an amazing teacher, so that made me happy. I really do love teaching, haha. But yeah, so that made me feel good. She said she was really impressed with my Chinese, and that she appreciated that I was always in a good mood, haha.

All the studying is going good as well. I'm glad I stayed here for the full 9 weeks because I feel like I've learned so much about teaching and gospel and Chinese, and it's really good. It's kinda funny because when I learned Chinese in high school it was mainly focused on characters and not tones, but here it's totally different. They really emphasize tones, which is what I need to work on, so I'm glad. I've started to memorize some traditional characters (like 6 words a day or so) just so I can write some, but there are actually quite a lot that are the same in simplified, so that makes it easier. I'm going through the Book of Mormon in Chinese too just to focus on recognition, and I'm doing pretty good, so it's going good.

A lot of the gospel study is just focused on what you will be teaching your investigator that day, which is good because I feel like I learn a lot that way. But I still read my Book of Mormon just for myself like 30 minutes in the morning and a little at night as well. So the studying is going good too! I'm excited to go to Taiwan and just be surrounded by the culture again like we were in Shanghai.

Well I love you!! Tell everyone hi for me and to look out for me on Saturday night!

-Qiao Jie Mei