His plan is a whole lot bigger

Hello everyone!

This week has been good! This week was transfers, so Elder Bryner went home and I am staying in Incheon for the next 6 weeks with Elder Woolwine. It was nice to be able to keep working with the same companion because we didn't have to waste time in getting to work over here. And we are trying to accomplish some pretty ambitious goals this transfer, including speaking only Korean to each other for the entirety of the next 6 weeks. There are exceptions for when we teach English class or meet with English speakers, but besides that it's all Korean. It's always a little hard to do, but it definitely helps with Korean, especially since you don't have to switch your mind from English to Korean when you need to talk to a Korean. So maybe ask me again in 4 weeks how I feel about it, but no complaints at least for now.

셀카(saer-ka) = Selfie

Elder Rossi, he has a condition called OSD (Obsessive Service Disorder)

I think one of the hardest things about being a missionary in Korea is trying to successfully visit somebody briefly. We tried to deliver some cookies to some members outside their door this week, and before we knew it we were on their couch with a plate of pastries, tangerines, and an offer to eat dinner with them. So the next member we visited, we had to revise our strategy and stay outside the door no matter what. Korean people are just so nice and generous, I can't handle it.

Probably the strangest thing I did this week was eat dinner with a purely American family at their house. It's the first time I've done it since I got to Korea, and it made me remember just how different the culture can be. First of all, you ALWAYS take off your shoes when you enter a home (and even some restaurants). So of course, we took off our shoes at the doorstep, but then had a small panic attack when they just wore them into the house. Another thing about Korea is that as a male and especially as a missionary. We never shake any female's hand. I'm still not exactly sure why, but it it just not right here. So when the American mom offered to shake our hands, we had a second small panic attack. But I think we acted normal enough for them to invite us back at some point (maybe), and I have to admit it was nice to have some lasagna and homemade American style bread for a change.

Besides that, not much else is new here. I've been doing a lot of translation lately for the English kids in our ward, which is still pretty hard especially when there is a substitute and she doesn't slow down at all, but you figure out how to manage.. We still haven't found anybody new to teach yet, which is pretty rough since we've been searching for so long. But one thing I've learned here is to trust in Heavenly Father's timing, because his plan is a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more important than ours. 

Have a great week everyone!

6 month mark

Hello Everyone!

This week, I passed my 6 month mark of my mission, which leaves me with only 75% of my mission left and I can't quite believe it, I still feel like I got off the plane last week. But I am enjoying every second of this mission (except the ones where my companion forgets his wallet and we have to walk through a snowstorm instead of taking the subway)..

This week, my companion Elder Bryner goes home, so we had this past week packed with meals with friends and church members, and it's still not over yet since he doesn't leave Incheon until Wednesday. We help give meals to seniors, and the workers there even bought a fancy cake and sang for Elder Bryner since it was his last time there. And we also got transfer calls, and Elder Woolwine and I will continue to serve together in Incheon for at least the next six weeks. It will be weird going back to only having 1 companion at a time, but that is most likely how it will be for the remainder of my mission.

Some other fun instances this week included a verbal attack on the subway, which is not uncommon among missionaries. Anyways, this guy came up to me and told me in half English and half Korean that my nametag was a "glory cross." I'm not actually sure what that means, but this man definitely expected me to know.. And I really have no way of knowing if it was supposed to be a complement or insult, so if anyone has any insight on the matter, please inform me via email.

Another fun thing about talking to people is that they are always very complementary of your Korean. Some people will tell me I'm good at Korean after I say hello to them, which is good I guess... Anyways, usually the complement is just a one sentence, "Wow, you are good at speaking Korean" kind of sentence, but I had quite the different experience with a taxi driver this week. I was sitting in the front seat, so I asked him how long he had been driving a taxi and he said it had been a long time, then asked how long it had been since I came to Korea. I told him 4 months, and this man absolutely lost it. He could not stop laughing, and I was legitimately worried that he was going to crash the taxi. Then through his tears of laughter, he went on and on about how he learned English for 11 years in school like all Koreans but still can't speak at all, and was very surprised at how well we spoke Korean. So the Koreans are very supportive of people trying to learn their language.

And on the English side of my service here, we actually were asked to give a presentation at Chadwick academy, an international K-12 school. This school is located in Songdo, an artificial island off of Incheon that is one of the richest parts of Korea. So this Chadwick academy, tuition runs about 40,000$ a year, and it is nicer than most colleges. And the classes are all in English, so all the students are fluent, and there are several international students. So the librarian there does something every year called "Living Book" where she asks a bunch of people with interesting stories to come and give 15 minute presentations, and the kids walk around and choose which one they want to go to. So we actually got to talk about what it is like to be a missionary in Korea, which was a super great opportunity. And the swimming coach is a member of our church, so we got a free tour of the school after, we definitely lucky to have that opportunity.

That time when we were "the story" at a rich English-speaking school in Korea

And in the island of Songdo, there is also a University of Utah campus that I mentioned before. All of the members of our church that speak English in Incheon meet there for church, and there is about 30 members. Previously they were just known as a group of the Seoul English branch, but this week they actually got to become their own branch, which was super exciting to be a part of the church history here in Incheon. And being able to be a missionary for both the Songdo branch and the regular Korean ward is a great blessing, I definitely consider myself lucky to be serving here in Incheon!

Have a great week everyone!

Korea does have some really cool drinks

Hello everyone!

No complaints from Incheon this week, missionary work is the best! Actually, I think I got food poisoning this week, which definitely wasn't fun but it let up pretty quickly so no worries here.

This week is my companion, Elder Bryner's last week in Korea, so we already have meals scheduled every day this week, and there will no doubt be several more. So we're bracing ourselves to be stuffed for the entire week, and to meet with some outstanding members of our church and others we are teaching. We have actually been making cards to express gratitude to people who have helped us or that we want to get to know better. It took a little bit of time, but we now actually have around 30 of these finished products:

The Late Great Elder Bryner

One fun family we taught this week was a Mongolian family in our ward. The husband has been a member of the church for a long time and the wife got baptized last year, so we visited to help keep teaching them. The problem is, the husband speaks only a tiny bit of English and Korean, so communicating can be pretty hard. The wife is a little better at Korean, but they usually look at Mongolian scriptures or other reference materials while we speak in very simple Korean, and it turns out okay. There really are a lot of foreigners here, I think I've heard the Book of Mormon read in Korean, English, Mongolian, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese since I've been here. It's such a great opportunity to meet people from around the world, I'm so grateful to be able to serve in Korea.

I did try one new Korean cuisine this week that I wanted to share. It was called 동치미(dong-chi-mi) and it is a pink traditional Korean drink made of kimchi and fermented radishes. And it tastes exactly like you would imagine it would, I will just leave it at that.

On the other hand though, Korea does have some really cool drinks, including carbonated milk soda, liquid yogurt, and fruit soda with real chunks of fruit inside, which are all super delicious.

That time when we were "the story" at a rich English-speaking school in Korea

Here in Korea, a lot of the social traditions are pretty different. One, I didn't catch on to until recently, but almost everyone here does it. When a guest leaves a house, most people (since they live in giant apartment buildings) will walk the guest to the elevator and wait until the elevator door shuts until they go back inside, or walk them to the staircase. And some people will even ride the elevator down with you and walk you outside or even walk you to the bus stop in some cases. Koreans are really good about guest hospitality, that's one of the really cool things about their culture.

As far as missionary work goes, we are doing a lot of talking to people on the streets and especially on the subway, where you tend to be able to have better conversations. However, we still haven't been able to find anyone new to teach in a pretty long time. But we're working harder every week, so I know we will be able to find someone who is prepared soon. And regardless of that, I know that this is the work of our Heavenly Father, and that I receive guidance and help from him every day. There really is no greater call than that of a missionary!

Have a great week!

-Elder Bigelow

Seolar

Hello Everyone! 

There was lots of holidays this week, especially here in Korea!

The biggest one was 설날(Seolar), the lunar New Year, which I mentioned before, but it lasts for 4 days so it was about half the week. We spent Monday night at a church member's house, eating Rice Cake soup, which causes you to age one year here, so they always eat it on New Years. Also, we got to have a training/ celebration with about half of our mission, which was a lot of fun, especially seeing all the people that I served with in Mokdong.

Mokdong district reunited

Pictures taken in black and white become at least 15% cooler

We needed these pictures for a very missionary-oriented purpose, taking posed pictures is not the only thing we do..

Tripanionship 2.0

Our very...special companion

Another Holiday this week was Valentine's day, which I completely forgot about until an American mentioned it more than halfway through the day, I guess that shows how out of the loop missionaries really are. But actually, Korea does Valentine's day pretty differently. It's not really celebrated at all here, but they do have something called Black Day and White Day. I don't understand it yet completely, but on white Day, the men buy gifts for the women, and on black day, women buy gifts for the men. So White Day is about a week before Valentine's day, and the streets were filled with people selling flowers.

As I mentioned before, my missionary team covers a small English group in addition to our normal Korean congregation. This week, they had an adult dinner so we got to go with them and eat gourmet American burgers. So with American food and American people, I was about as close to America as I'll ever get here in Korea. 

Also they asked us to speak in their group on Sunday, so I gave probably the only talk I will give in English here last week. At this point, speaking in English is almost harder than Korean because as missionaries spent a lot of time here, their grammar patterns start to get mixed up and they start to say things that just don't make since. But I've only been here for about 4 months, so I think I'm still fluent in English at this point..

Forgive my handwriting, I'm new at this whole "Korean" thing

Another thing the missionaries in our district have been working on is an introduction page to give to people on the street. So it explains a little bit about us and why we're here, just to show others that we're normal people just like them. It also explains a little bit about the message we are sharing, since we often only have a minute or two to talk to people. Originally we typed them, but someone suggested that it would be more attention-grabbing if we wrote it ourselves... and it truly does grab your attention, especially because my Korean penmanship is at about a kindergarten level currently.. But here it is!

Have a great week everyone!

-Elder Bigelow

Fanciest face masks in all of Korea

Hello Everyone! And a happy lunar New Year!

Here in Korea, the lunar new year is the second biggest holiday of the year, so it's like new year's all over again, except it's 4 days long. But We're right in the middle of it, it lasts until tuesday or wednesday. Some of the traditions for this holiday include: Traveling to visit your grandparents( who usually live in the countryside, which leaves the bigger cities virtually empty), buying large boxes of SPAM for your boss, eating rice cake soup, and wearing 한복(Korean traditional dresses/clothes). As a mission, we will do a training/celebration this week, which should be fun!

설날, the only time where missionaries get to wear special clothes. Pictured here is Korean traditional clothing, known as 한복(Han-bok)

Some other highlights from this week included an invitation to a Korean buffet. In America, buffets have kind of a negative stereotype, but it is quite the opposite here. Some of the nicest food is found at Korean buffets, and a member of our ward invited the missionaries and a bunch of others. And this was probably the most confusing dinner I've ever been to, on account of the fact that there were people from 4 different countries represented there, speaking 3 different languages. We had 6 American missionaries, 4 Korean men, then a member from Uzbekistan who would sometimes have conversations with the other member from Moldova in Russian, we were quite the spectacle in the restaurant.

Another cool thing this week is that my companions got to be models. Someone we are teaching is developing super fancy face masks (Koreans wear face masks a lot to block the dust and other pollution) and asked my companions to model them since they have blue eyes. My eyes were too close to brown which I guess isn't interesting enough, but we all got a free fancy face mask, they're valued at around 50$ so we consider ourselves pretty lucky.

The fanciest masks in all of Korea and arguably the world

Our English group in Incheon! I'm the silhouette on the end...

My favorite part of this week though was the people we were able to talk to. We started teaching someone new, and they are progressing really well so far. But we still don't have a lot of people to teach, so we did a lot of talking with people this week. One night, we said a prayer before we started so that we would be able to be led to people who were ready to hear our message, then started walking. The only man we were able to talk to that night was trying to speak Korean and English but was too drunk to do either and ended up just being unintelligible. So we went back to our house that night a little sad, but we tried not to get discouraged. Then the next day, we tried talking to people on the subway after saying a prayer and we were extremely successful. I had two of the best conversations of my whole mission, and we got several phone numbers, along with several people who have already set up appointments to meet with us. We essentially had people just wanting to give us their number or meet with us, it was a little bit out of the ordinary but I know that it was an answer to prayer. Being able to experience the increased guidance from the Spirit as a missionary is an amazing blessing, and I'm so grateful to have this calling.

Have a great week everyone, 세복 많이 받으세요! 

Elder Beagle

Hello Everyone!

There's nothing but good things to report here from Incheon! Actually, I was a little sick for most of the week but I think it was inevitable with how cold it has been. We did get to go to the temple in Seoul this week, which involves a 2 hour bus ride from Incheon. The bus was running late, so we got there just in time for the last missionary temple session, which was in Korean. We got translators so we could hear it in English, but going for my first time in Korean was so cool.

I introduced myself in church today, this congregation is a lot bigger so I was pretty nervous, but everyone is super nice. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but when you say "Bigelow" in Korean, the first half of it sounds exactly like the word for "Beagle" in Korean. So by this time, I've accepted it and introduced myself to the ward as follows: "Hi, I'm Elder Bigelow. You know how there's a dog called a beagle? It sounds pretty similar to my name... I'm not a puppy, but I am cute like a puppy, so you can call me Elder Beagle if it will help you remember my name" It got a good laugh, and I think people will actually remember my name, they tend to have a hard time with English names.

My desk is only messy because I'm the hardest working missionary

The spacious missionary penthouse apartment

Next week is one of the 2 biggest Korean holidays of the year, 설날(Seolar) which I think corresponds to the Chinese New Year. It is a week from today, so they have big celebrations and nobody is on the streets at all to talk to the missionaries.. But we get to have a mission-wide conference which should be really fun.

And as far as mission-wide events go, this week was "korean week" in our mission, which means that we try to set high SYL (speak your language) goals and do our best to keep them. So my two companions and I decided to speak only Korean for the whole week, starting from last Tuesday to tomorrow. We actually did really well, we really only spoke English when we taught English class or spoke with people that spoke English. We made a lot of mistakes and things were pretty quiet sometimes in our companionship, but I definitely got a lot speaker with fluidity of speaking this week so I'm happy with Korean week.

The other Elder Missionaries in our ward had a baptism this week, it was a 10-year-old girl from a part-member family. I was a witness for the baptism for the first time, which was pretty special and it's awesome that our ward is getting baptisms. We're going to meet someone this week who might be progressing towards a baptism, we've been working really hard and I think we may be able to see the fruits of our efforts soon. Patience is hard sometimes, but it makes the moments of success that much sweeter.

Have a great week everyone!

Less people selling vegetables and socks on the street

Hello everyone!

I am officially settled into my new area here in Incheon, and I'm having a great time. I'm serving with two companions for the next six weeks actually, which is usually not typical. One of them is Elder Bryner, he is from Utah and goes back to America in about 6 weeks. The other is Elder Woolwine, who is from Arizona and has been in Korea for a little over a year. What will probably happen is that in 6 weeks, Elder Bryner will go home and Elder Woolwine and I will both stay here in Incheon. Serving with 2 other companions is so much fun, although we all share one cell phone which can get difficult at times. 

Incheon isn't that much different from Seoul, lots of huge buildings and lots of people, although I feel like there's less people selling vegetables and socks on the street here. Probably the biggest difference here from the last area is the house we stay in. In Mokdong, I could see 95% of the house by standing in one spot, but in Incheon, we live on the 28th floor of a pretty nice apartment building. We live with two other missionaries, so the house is pretty big in comparison. And our apartment has a gym in the basement, so we go there for our 30 minutes of exercise every morning which is really nice 

This week was the coldest predicted of the year I think, so the fact that I made it through is a relief. There wasn't any snow, just lots of 0 degree Fahrenheit days, where you use a scarf to protect your face but then your breath freezes on the scarf instead. We are able to be inside a lot of the day though, which comes in handy. The church here is also a lot bigger than my last area, it is the biggest LDS building in Korea currently, I would definitely get lost in it without my companions.

I didn't introduce myself at church this week because the schedule was pretty full, so I'll do it next week. But our church attendance was about 100 or so, which is definitely bigger than MokDong. There's one English family in our ward, and the people that normally do translation for them were busy or gone on Sunday, so we had to split up as missionaries and translate for their kids. So I ended up in the Primary, live translating from Korean to English for the first time ever. It was pretty nerve-wracking at first, but the kid I was translating for is a genius and knew everything being taught already so it wasn't as stressful as I thought it was going to be.

We had to leave church early to go to an area of Incheon called SongDo, where there is a group of all English speakers that meet to have church. The University of Utah has a campus in Incheon, so we meet there for church. Most of the members work for the college or at an English school nearby, so there's about 25 people that attend. We helped teach primary, then ate a meal after church like they do every week. It was an American food feast, which I have to admit is nice every once in a while..

This area is so different from Mokdong which is crazy considering they're only about an hour away, but the one thing that is always the same is this church. Everywhere you go there are faithful members, and everywhere you go, this church is as true as it always is. I'm extremely grateful for this church led by Jesus Christ, and even more grateful that I get to be a missionary representing this church.

Have a great week!

-Elder Bigelow