Week 45 May 18, 2015 "My first week in Incheon"

    So I loved talking to you all last week, it was the best!! My new area is sweet and my new comp is super cool. His name is Elder Ely and he is from Georgia. My new ward is called the 청라 ward and it is a great ward! Everyone is super cool and the ward missionary leader is awesome. We had our first district meeting and missionary meeting this week and they both went really well. Our district has 10 missionaries in it so it is pretty big. During missionary meeting I was making the ward mission leader laugh his head off and he was loving it. I learned some dialect from Busan that not to many foreign people know and for some reason when I use that dialect the Koreans cant not laugh. Then I told the ward missionary leader he could become an apostle because he is so awesome and he thought that was pretty funny. My new house has 2 floors!!! It is the coolest house ever. I will take some pics to send next week or later on I just forgot to take some this past week. It is on main floor but then it has a loft where we all sleep. It also has 2 bathrooms and is way bigger than both the other houses I have lived in so I am in heaven and hope I stay here for a long time. 

     Before I left Siheung I had to say good bye to all of my buddies. I got 3 meals the day before I left so man was I stuffed. Siheung was a good place and I learned a lot there. My comp and I weren't always on the same page but it was good. Serving is the country definitely wasn't my favorite but it was something different that I needed. My new house has 6 in it and we all get along great so it is a blast! One of the older missionaries in the house, Elder Dewey, is training and the Elder he is training is a Mexican! Woo hoo!!! My prayers have been answered I get to serve with an amigo in my district! He speaks Spanish so sometimes he will speak to me in Spanish so that is pretty fun. He is also super funny so it just makes it better much better. 

      Out of nowhere this week my body just went whack and my stomach was trashed. We had service that day at an old people home and the whole bus ride to the place I felt like I was going to throw up... When we got to the service I was still just feeling like poo but decided to just fight it out instead of going home. I told some of the ladies there who were cooking with us for the old people and then one of them had me sit down. When I sat down she grabbed my hand and squeezed some pressure points super hard and then gave me a massage. I don't know how it was supposed to work but it really didn't do much. They hard someone go buy me medicine and the person who did brought back two bottles of I don't know what haha. I drank them and they didn't do too much but I couldn't go number "2" for the next few days so if that was what the medicine was supposed to do to me it worked. My tummy lately has just been kind of funky and pretty much rejects and or doesn't like a lot of what I eat. I don't know for sure what is wrong with it but it is common is Korea for your tummy to get funky so I don't think it is anything that bad. 

      We met an investigator named 강문선 who supposedly recently has had more English interest lately but when we met her we were able to talk about the Book of Mormon. It went well and was a pretty good meeting. This area has an English class that isn't just old people so that is awesome and I was stoked to have a super awesome English class. We don't teach every week but it still should be fun. We have a boy getting baptized in a few weeks whose parents are both members but he is older than 8 so they had to teach him all of the lessons and this past week we went to their house to do his interview. Elder Dewey interviewed but we all went to the members house and while we were waiting I was sitting there with the other Elders and the parents talking and because Elder Corona is a greenie he was super lost. It was kind of fun because he kept asking me what everyone was saying and I was able to translate. It made me think back to when I was being trained and in those same shoes. I guess my Korean has improved and I can understand more and more over time so that's good. 

     We were riding the bus this past week and I almost punched a girl straight in the face by accident. I was telling all the Elders a story and during the story I swung my arm showing an action of what happened in the story and this girl comes out of nowhere. I didn't even see her and wouldn't have swung if I did. My comp was sitting by a guy from the Philippines who saw what happened and he along with everyone else was laughing so hard. Then right after that I accidentally lead Elder Corona into the girls bathroom. He had to pee really bad the whole bus ride and as soon as we got off I walked him into a building and sent him into the first bathroom I saw. The door was open and I didn't see the sign but as soon as he got in the bathroom and was going I noticed that it was the woman's bathroom. Then some lady comes walking out of the stall and kind of freaks out but man was it so hard not to laugh. We had some many laughs that day it was crazy. We had a boss meal last night at the ward missionary leader's house and since I said during sacrament meeting that I was a 식신 which means "God of food" I had to eat a lot! I was so stuffed but the food was tasty so I wasn't complaining. 

     Well that is enough on what I did. To end this email I want to share something I learned this week. I was reading somewhere on hard times and why we have them. You can look at it from the aspect that just like a gardner who wants his plants to grow to what they are supposed to become. If those plants grow into something besides that he will chop them down and wait for them to grow again. God likewise does this to us. He cuts us down and gives us hard times because He loves us and knows our potential. He knows the beautiful plant that we are supposed turn into and won't accept anything but that. 

Love, 

Elder Picard

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My new companion, Elder Ely from Georgia.

My new area, love the city!