50 cheese sticks

Hello everyone, and a happy Thanksgiving! I trust you all ate plenty of turkey for my sake. Korea has its own Thanksgiving-type holiday in September, so they don't celebrate American thanksgiving here. But my companion and I decided to get pizza on the night of Thanksgiving to celebrate. Korean pizza is completely different from American pizza, I can tell you that. Common Korean pizza toppings include: corn, mustard, sweet potatoes, shrimp, etc. So they do taste very different, but pizza is pizza and a sweet potato pizza is almost like eating mashed potatoes I think..

One of the neighboring wards actually had a Thanksgiving party on Saturday, so we helped them with that and had a loosely American-based feast. Nobody really eats turkey here, so ham was substituted instead. It was a fun night, full of making paper pilgrim hats and pretend turkey hunting.

The weather here has definitely changed, and I'm not sure I'm going to make it through the winter. Being from central California, I'm used to much more mild winters. This week, however, it got down to about -5 degrees Celsius, which is somewhere in the 20's in Fahrenheit. It evened snowed here twice this week, not a lot but definitely a new experience for me.

And when it gets cold, the members tend to worry about the missionaries. Somebody from our ward actually bought my companion a sweater (I already had some so she gave me 50 cheese sticks instead) and all during church yesterday, the members kept checking my suit coat to make sure it was made out of warm material.

The Mokdong ward is very small, so they have a hard time filling positions. There was somebody in our ward that had 5 callings. However, he left for his mandatory military service, so there was lots of assignments left unfilled. One of them was the seminary teacher, so the bishop asked us to teach seminary a couple weeks ago, and we started last week. So here I am, teaching seminary less than 6 months after I finished it myself. We wake up at 5 am now, which is 1.5 hours earlier than normal, and our class has 2 students on a normal day. I don't know how long we're going to be teaching it, but it is definitely an added challenge to missionary work. Also, the teaching manual is all in Korean so I have to rely on my companion to do most of the preparation. But it is a good chance to know the scriptures better and to practice teaching in Korean, so I'm excited.

I didn't eat many new foods this week, but I did eat a lot of squid. I am getting used to it, but seeing the suction cups on the tentacles right before you take a bite still catches me off guard a little bit. 

One good dessert here is 설빙(seor-bing), which is a little bit like a snowcone but much fancier and better tasting.

The teaching is going very well, we're working with a couple great people that I sincerely hope will decide to come unto Christ. Spending all of your time working to help others definitely makes you more tired, but the happiness that you feel far outweighs anything else. A month has passed since I've been in country and I was worried that time was passing too quickly, but I thought yesterday, "it's only been one month here, I still have 21 more. That's awesome!" I love the people here and I love sharing this message of eternal happiness with them, and I still get 21 more months to do it.

Have a great week! If my fingers don't freeze off, you should hear from me next week..