Time is flyin by - hit the 1 year mark!

Time is just flyin by! It really hit me today when I was talking to some people and they asked me how long I have been studying Chinese while out on my mission. I typically answer this question by saying "oh about 8 or 9 months". However, today when I answered this question it hit me that it hasn't been 8 or 9 months but rather a year - so crazy. My companions reminded me today that I can start saying "about a year" when I get asked those questions…weird. So today was a fast day, which means it was a busy day, which means it was a good day. I love days like these when we're just running around appointment to appointment. Today we found this awesome neighborhood, which is massive and basically 90 percent Chinese (and like 70 percent of those Chinese are Taiwanese... get to practice my Taiwanese... love it). I really enjoyed being able to speak a lot of Taiyu there. It was neat because the first 3 people we talked to there said in broken English, "oh sorry my native tongue is Taiwanese," I replied back in Taiwanese saying, "oh no worries I speak Taiwanese fluently” (even though I’m not actually fluent...I can hold a decent conversation and really make them laugh with a couple phrases I know though). They absolutely freaked out when I said this and were all ears to what I had to say - so much fun. So we found a few really cool people who were willing to listen to our message about the Book of Mormon and set up another time to have us over. We only got to knock on a few doors in that neighborhood but we're excited to hit it up more now that we know it's chock full of Chinese people. Afterwards, we had a good correlation meeting with Kyle Evans (our branch mission leader). He once again got us fired up to do this work. He also kept telling me how I have to teach these missionaries here in California how to contact. He told me since I served in Taiwan I developed a skill that about 95% of the missionaries here in Cali don’t have. He says I really need to teach my companions how to do this work Taiwan style. So now I have a little more pressure to introduce the Taiwan way of doing things. I think bro. Evans is right though, the elders here could really benefit from picking up the youbanfa attitude. I'll see what I can do without seeming too biased toward my old mission. We had a good dinner at In n' Out with the Korean elders and then it was off to English class. I taught the advanced class tonight with one of the Korean elders, which was fun. Oh yeah I forgot to mention how I have been learning a bunch of Korean lately. My comp Elder Kim has been cramming the Korean into my head. I told him I want a goal to be able to communicate with people in Korean before we split up. So yeah, I have been having a good time trying to pick up with other language. It’s really cool because there are a ton of Koreans here in Irvine too so I get to practice speaking it with them. They love my efforts and struggle to speak their language. I can actually read most of their characters now but I don’t understand the meaning yet. Hopefully I can develop this language while I have the chance to live with a native speaker.