Shake My Vanilla: Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

Elder Wolf's brother, Brandon, is in his 3rd year of Chinese class in high school. He informed us today that this Sunday is the big Mid-Autumn Festival for the Chinese. We thought it would be fun to celebrate it and share the information about it.

"Falling on the 15th day of the 8th month according to Chinese lunar calendar, the Mid-Autumn Festival is the second grandest festival after the Spring Festival in China. It takes its name from the fact that it is always celebrated in the middle of the autumn season. The day is also known as the Moon Festival, as at that time of the year the moon is at its roundest. On this day, family members gather to appreciate the bright full moon, eat moon cakes at night, express strong yearnings toward their homes and think of family members who live far away. 2012 Mid-Autumn Festival falls on September 30. People enjoy one day off on that day which is usually connected with the weekend. The 2012 Mid-Autumn Day is connected with the National Day holiday (October 1 - 7), so people enjoy an eight-day holiday from September 30 to October 7. The long holiday with pleasant autumn weather becomes a peak time for travel." (http://www.travelchinaguide.com/essential/holidays/mid-autumn.htm)

To help the missionaries celebrate, we sent Chris some Oreos (semi-close to moon cakes), Life Savers, Mentos, mints, and other various round candy. If we would have had more time to plan, we would have been more creative with the ideas.

Chris is doing really well in the MTC. He said that "time is flying by super fast!" He is working hard on the language. His email said, "Chinese is coming to me. It's slow, but it's coming. I'm understanding a lot more everyday, just learning new words is the hard part. I'm memorizing about 15 new words each day. The Skype TRC is fun. We had to do a 40 minute lesson yesterday, but the connection was so terrible. It kept getting worse as time went on too, so we had to cut it short at 30 minutes. :( but from what we could actually hear, I understood about half of it. Some people talk really fast and its really hard to understand them, but I can pick out a word here and there. On saturday (when we used to do TRC) we taught a lesson to our regular investigator and then a brother came to our classroom and told us we were late for TRC. They forgot to take us off the schedule for saturday's, so we had absolutely no preparation and we taught 2, 20-minute lessons in chinese. Hard, but good."

Chris sent an SD card home with some pictures on it, but we have been unable to read it. This is the 2nd card we've had troubles with. We'll have to figure out another way of sending pictures before he goes to Taiwan. Right now he said they are scheduled to leave around October 30th.

Here are a few more pictures that he sent us a couple of weeks ago. He loves to take pictures of the mountains and flowers, etc. Some of his shots of the temple have been amazing!