Hello everyone! I made it to Australia! I flew in last Wednesday and it was so great! Sydney is so awesome and super pretty too! It was a little awkward getting all situated because I was the only missionary to come into the mission this week for some reason, about a week before transfers, so I guess I got a little head start! There are 25 new missionaries coming into the mission this Wednesday! So I don't know why I didn't just come in with them. But I love it here so much!
Australia is so great! The things that surprised me most besides the diversity was the crazy trees and the birds! The birds here are so weird! They make the strangest sounds and they look so funny. They're pretty friendly though. I'll send some pictures. The trees are so cool too. Driving here is insane! Everything's on the opposite side and there are so many roundabouts and little streets. Everyone has tiny cars and are super good at parallel parking! The streets are always packed with parked cars everywhere so it's pretty scary! I always think that we're going to get in an accident every time we go driving to visit people! Everything here is so new and awesome to me!
So I was in a temporary trio companionship until transfers today, so today I got my first real companion! His name is Elder Hung! He's our district leader and he's from Hong Kong! He's a lot like me because we both want to work really hard together and be perfectly obedient, so it's such a blessing. Also we're both clean freaks so we always clean up our apartment together and whip out the hand sanitizer when we touch something nasty. hahaha. He's great. Plus Elder Hung speaks Cantonese, Mandarin, and English! so together we speak 4 languages, which is really helpful in sydney because it's so diverse here.
So my area is really cool too. It's the University of New South Wales area, so it's just packed with college students from around the world! Mostly a ton of chinese people, a few koreans, and then the rest either people from new zealand, australia, south america, or other asian or middle eastern countries. It's so diverse here, it's amazing. Everyone speaks english to some degree though. And they all have the best accents ever! Since there's so many chinese people, almost all the restaurants in the area are chinese or asian food restaurants, which is pretty cool. I've eaten authentic chinese food almost everyday in the last week! It's really good.
My area is pretty unique since we are around the university. So basically we can't proselyte on the university campus so whenever we go on campus we have to wear normal clothes and take off our name tags! So we're pretty much undercover missionaries like Abinadi! It was super weird for me to take off my name tag and wear normal clothes the first time in a couple months! It's fine I guess haha. So we teach our investigators on campus, undercover, but when we find people to teach outside of campus we wear normal missionary clothes.
The ward and all the members here are so awesome, too! They feed us a bunch each week so it's super nice! I got to introduce myself in church yesterday and share my testimony with them. They are all so nice and loving. I'm super grateful and excited to be able to serve them for the coming weeks!
Thanks everyone for the emails and support! I'm having a blast here and working hard! I hope everyone is happy and doing well! I know that missionary work is the most important and the happiest work in the world! I'm so grateful to be a missionary and to help these people learn about Jesus Christ and about His gospel. I love you all heaps! I hope these pictures get to everyone too!
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