Church in Mandarin!

July 16, 2017

Sunday in China means you go to church in the native language, right?? 

(Thank you, once again, elevator rug for reminding us what day it is)

:)

Hong Kong had a lot of different congregations, so we went to the Mandarin speaking one since that is the language Caleb knows. They had english speaking ones, but what fun is that?!

We took the metro or MTR as the locals call it to the church building. 

It was a pretty neat experience to hear everything in Mandarin. Caleb had to translate for me the entire time. One of their returned missionaries spoke. She served in Taiwan :)  It was a pretty small branch because they had just split the ward maybe a month or two earlier. 

As the sacrament meeting went on, we could see a little girl kind of running a muck. There was a new member getting confirmed and the little girl ran up to be in the circle, not that my eyes were open during the prayer ;) She was adorable! We could tell that the dad was one of the members of the bishopric. His wife and three young children were sitting near the front of the congregation. He would do his best to help his wife by trying to calm the children from the stand. I looked over at his wife as she was trying to keep the kids in the pew and quite during the meeting. I thought to myself, "That's what we must look like!" haha For some reason I felt like I really needed to see that other people are in a very similar situation as Caleb and me. I know there are women in the church whose husbands are in the bishopric and they have WAY more kids than we do or some other thing that is way harder than our life, but seeing this sweet Asian family helped me not feel so alone. If she and I spoke the same language, I am sure we would have had a great conversation! haha 

In Sunday school, I even participated with Caleb's help :) Everyone was so kind and encouraging at my attempt to speak their language. I still have a goal to learn the language by the time I am 30!! {Times a tickin'!!} 

Relief Society and Priesthood were combined, so that was nice!

As we were in China longer, my testimony of God's love for ALL of His children kept increasing. 

It was lovely to worship with the saints in Hong Kong :)

Here we are outside of the church building.

After church, Daffie picked us up and took us out to lunch where we ate jellyfish, curried squid, and dim som stuff, dumplings and yummy dessert.

After lunch, we took a double decker bus back to our hotel. I thought double decker buses were only a London thing, but apparently not! We sat at the top, in the front. It was a little scary honestly haha Chinese drivers are a bit nutsy, but we got there safely so that's a plus!

Pics from the top of the bus of the city:

The bus we were on:

We survived!

That night, Caleb's friend Ziad (from Lebanon, but has been living in Hong Kong for 28 years) and his girlfriend Lennia (from Argentina) picked us up in a really nice Audi (which is one of my dream cars!) and took us out to eat for dinner. They took us to the fanciest restaurant I have ever been to in my entire life. It was GORGEOUS and the food was AMAZING!!!! It was one of those restaurants where they give you sorbet to cleanse your pallet and let you pick which type of bread to eat. One of our options was squid ink bread. YEP! Squid ink!! haha We had some. It was black bread. Deep, deep, deep black bread. Tasted fine! After I ate it, Ziad told me my teeth were all black now hahaha the stinker!!! He was really funny and his girlfriend was so great! I loved her so much! 

Here was our lime sorbet to cleanse our pallet.

I felt super cheesy taking a picture, but it was soo cool!!

Amazing how dry ice can make things 10x cooler haha!

Our dessert

was

amazing

yum.