Happiest Place on Earth

It has been a very busy week (but I guess we say that every week). Mom and I celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary. We continued our celebrating throughout the week as you will soon see. 

But first, the work. Mom spent the  bulk of her week doing the organizing and paperwork for nine return missionaries from Cambodia to go to the temple in Manilla. She was up to her eye balls getting everything put together on time. I spent much of my time working on real estate issues in India. I also spent all day Saturday (and into the evening) working through legal problems associated with running the patron housing for the Hong Kong temple. This is the housing used by groups throughout Asia when they come to the HK temple. I was figuring out registration and permitting issues associated with running a "guest house" next to the temple under HK law. 

Well, on to the pictures.

Mom and I celebrated our anniversary with a dinner at the Butcher's Club. (AJ and Kels, this is what is left of the bar/hamburger place you took us to in Wanchai -- it is now more of a restaurant out in Quarry Bay, next to North Point). Mom got the traditional burger. Delicious!

I got the steak (they specialize in this now). Also, delicious!

This is us waiting at the restaurant for our food.

These are dozens of cable cars (they call them "ding dings" here because they warn people of their presence with a bell that dings) all stopped and backed up in Causeway Bay. Unfortunately, the bells did not effectively warn an older gentleman who was hit by the ding ding in the lead. We all had to get off our ding dings (we were about the fourth or fifth back) because the police stopped all the cars while they took care of this guy. Fortunately it looked like a minor injury. We had a nice walk from there to the MTR, but we love walking the city at night.

This is the stairway in the Apple Store in Causeway Bay (one of six Apple Stores in HK). We bought each other speakers for our anniversary.


We've made friends with this little family from Beijing who live in our building near us. We were actually introduced to this couple (they have a 12 year old daughter who wasn't here with us this evening) by another senior couple who also live near us. We've got a little table tennis (not ping pong!) thing going on Thursday nights. Here we are playing doubles. 


Here, Coco and I are protesting the unfair play of Michael and your Mom.

These are really sweet people. There is sort of a mutual fascination that we have in each other. We hope you can meet them when you come visit.

So you may be wondering where the title for this blog post came from. As part of our week-long  wedding anniversary celebration, your Mom and I went to Disneyland on Friday. You may recognize the famous ride behind us.

Here we are enjoying the Moana show.

Your mom really chowed down on these Mickey Mouse ice-cream bars.

Here is the inside of Its a Small World.

We witnessed a most interesting fashion show all over inside Disneyland. Many of the young women dressed up in the most unusual, baby doll type of dresses and all sorts of make-up. I couldn't help but snap a few pictures of some of them.





And of course, we got our ketchup for our dinner in the form of Mickey.

Here we are with the castle behind us. There was the most incredible light and fireworks show on and around this castle at the end of the evening. 


And then the whole crowd headed for the single exit down Main Street after the show. We were shoulder to shoulder all the way out and then in the subway station and on the train all the way home.



This is the chapel we attend for church every Sunday. 

And this is the train station directly across the street from the church.
This is a little girl in Primary helping her teacher explain something. I can't read Chinese so I have no idea what they are explaining. Mom wanted this picture because the little girl reminded her of the little girls in the Its a Small World ride at Disneyland.

Our ward celebrates birthdays each month with a pot-luck lunch right after church. These are all the birthday people being celebrated. Check out the mango cake in the center of the table. Delicious!

Some of the primary kids eating lunch.

Well, that's it for this week. We love you all and are in our prayers multiple times each day.



 Love 
Dad and Mom
Pampa and Grandma





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Diquattro Time

Image
Dear Family, It has been another whirlwind of a week. Or more acurately, two weeks. We met up with the Carli, Jeremy, Miles, and Penny almost two weeks ago in Thailand for just a day, after which they took off for Phuket and we stayed in Bangkok for Char's temple seminar with 30 return missionaries. (That week is covered in detail in Char's letter.)  We returned home a week ago, Sunday night, at the same time that the Diquattros arrived from Thailand. So we met each other at the baggage claim in the airport Sunday night around 11pm and took two taxis home and moved in (all of us) into our apartment. These first two pictures are from our day in Bangkok together. We visited a market, did some elephant riding and toured the canal markets by boat. I included just a couple of pictures from that day.  Here, Miles is making friends with the local snake. And here we have Jeremy and Carli aboard an elephant. Monday morning, we were happy to hit the streets with Penny. First stop was ou...
Read more

One Final Thought

Image
One final thought. By now, the temple theme to our mission is clear, so bear with me for a wrap up and one more story.  As members of the church we often hear our apostles and prophets talk about "the gathering of Israel" and  the purpose of temples in that pursuit. I believe all that to be true and important, but I have come to believe that regular attendance at the temple also offers another kind of gathering. I have come to believe that temples are also sacred gathering places for those of us on this side of the veil. Scattered through this last 18 months of letters has been stories of our "random" and unexpected temple meetings with beloved missionaries and meeting Cindy without a plan. Remember our story on January 14th titled "The Dream that I Hadn't Even Thought Of? when against all odds we "bumped" into Sister Thi at the crowded mall food court?  A month or two after that meeting I found this post on her Facebook page: Returning home nearl...
Read more

Second to Last Week

Image
 Dear Family, We moved out of our office Friday night, packed and cleaned yesterday and just took all of our suit cases over to the office to wait for our return from Bangkok. We leave for Bangkok early tomorrow morning for Mom's last temple seminar. She has fifty kids coming this time she is pretty stressed with all the work it takes to put this together and then execute next week. We have to get up early to catch our plane to Bangkok so this will be pretty brief. A week ago we got a tremendous surprise. I've been working on getting a meeting with the Cambodian Ministry of Cult and Religion in connection with our offer to help the Ministry draft their new Freedom of Religion law. I delivered a model of the law to the Ministry a year ago and have been requesting a meeting ever since. Well, out of the blue last week I got a call (on Tuesday afternoon) that they would like to meet with me on Friday. So we quickly got a flight scheduled and left Thursday morning. The meeting was v...
Read more