Another Week

 Another Week

I feel like we have settled into a regular routine. We work hard all week -- we get to the office around 8:30 am and leave for home around 6 pm or so. And then we sleep in on Saturday, read in the mornings and go adventuring around for the rest of the day. Sundays we go to a Chinese ward where Char will be teaching the young women (of which there are two), and I will be teaching Gospel Doctrine. We get home around 2:30 in the afternoon, eat, and then go to the park where we read and watch people walk by. 

Here are a bunch of pictures from the week to help you get a little better idea of what we do.

The subway under the harbor is usually very crowded when we go to work. But every once in a while (I think maybe twice) we pay a little extra to ride first class. So here is Mom enjoying.

We took a trolley car ride yesterday. They call them "ding dings" there for the sound of their bells.  They are a double decker bus and we scored seats on the top deck, riding around the island to the end of the line. So here are a few pictures from the ding ding.

This was the end of the road.

And guess what we found at the end of the road.

The inside of our apartment door. The better to remember all of you.

I gave the spiritual thought last week Monday morning. I used Annie's reference to a talk so I treated everyone to a picture of my granddaughter as I shared a thought from the same talk.

 We had a huge rainstorm hit us yesterday afternoon. This picture was taken at 2:30 in the afternoon but it was as dark as could be.

Hong Kong is a city of great contrasts. So much of the city is filled with giant apartment buildings, many of which are old and in terrible shape. But then you get into the business district and I've never seen so many malls and luxury stores. When the rain hit we ducked into the closest mall. Every store was luxury, Versace, Dior, Gucci and stores I've never heard of. This is a little cake store in the mall --the cakes are all caviar cakes. An interesting idea.

          This is a picture of the ward house in the background -- the building with a short steeple.

This is Mom's young women's class. The girl on the left is 11 and the girl in the blue skirt is her sister (she is 15). They are the only two young women in the ward. The two other women are stake visitors. Just like in every YW class around the world they recite the YW theme together as they are doing in this picture.

This is my assistant, Polly with her 6 yr. old daughter

It was a surprising highlight of the week! We loved having a little one to play with. It made us realize how much we miss playing with our kids.

We had a hankering yesterday (Saturday) for tacos. So we found this place down the street. Not too bad!

(Ok, Dad asked me to proof his letter and I can't let this taco moment go with such little explanation! Dad woke up Saturday morning really wanting Mexican food and spent at least an hour looking up possibilities. We finally set out to get to another part of town. We took the MTR a couple of stops and then began to walk but our GPS kept getting tangled in the tall buildings and we were literally walking in circles getting more and more hangry every minute.  As we were finally aimed in the right direction we were caught in the above mentioned rainstorm which completely stopped our quest. That's when we ducked into the mall and got lost in the maze of luxury clothing stores and caviar bakeries.  By now we were so hungry Dad could hardly speak and just wanted to eat where we were but the mall didn't even have a restaurant that we could afford. We finally made our way back to the street, the rain had pretty much stopped and we finally figured out how to get to this little Cali Mex restaurant by hiking up the hillside through some smaller ally streets. The food was passible but not great...but we were hungry!)

Mom eating her favorite treat. Owen, can you guess what it is? You will have to zoom in to see.

The grocery store. (Actually one of many).





This couple walked up to us in the park this afternoon. They are tourists from Hunan, China who were visiting HK for just three days. The couldn't speak Cantonese and I can't speak Mandarin. So we struggled using a phone with some translation capability and a little bit of english which she barely spoke. But we had a good time trying to communicate, sharing pictures of our children and laughing. We had a Book of Mormon that we shared with them but they brought it back to us later telling us that they didn't want to waste it. It was english and they couldn't read it at all. It was a taste of real missionary work complete with the disappointment of gentle rejection. We need to start carrying a chinese BM along with our english one from now on. We're learning.

We love you all. Have a great week.