Keep Your Ax Sharpened: Next Stop: Montreal

Dear All,

I hope you appreciate my catchy subject line this week. I spent a long time coming up with it.

This is it. I'm leaving in less than 48 hours. Half of my district has already left and I'm the next to leave. I'm super excited.

It's been a pretty interesting week. We had in-field orientation every day except Thursday. In-field was a wonderful hour and a half every day telling us how to be a missionary. It was essentially the same as what we've been doing for the past nine weeks, except it was in English instead of Chinese. Pretty fun.

Thanksgiving was weird. We started off the morning with a "Continental breakfast" that was exactly the same as any un-continental breakfast we normally have. We then had a really cool Q and A devotional from Elder Bednar. That brings us up to four of the Twelve that we've seen here. Pretty cool. After the devotional we had a big Thanksgiving lunch that was surprisingly good for the MTC. After lunch, we watched a T C Christensen film called "Love, Kennedy," we had a sack dinner, and then bagged dry food into individual portions for a couple of hours. (Here's a link of more info and photos of the service project. MTC Service Project) After the service project, we had another devotional from the "Nashville Tribute Band," a country-style Mormon band that just sang a lot of country songs about the gospel and missions and stuff. It was it was fun, but nothing special. During one of the songs, some elders in the front of the hall decided it would be a great idea to stand up and start clapping along with the beat of the song. Pretty soon about half of the MTC joined in and the yells of a about a thousand 18-or-19-year-olds drowned out the actual song. Needless to say, the MTC presidency got really, really mad and we all got a passive-aggressive email about it the next day. It was pretty funny. I did not participate.

I got to talk to the head sound engineer for BYU as he was taking the sound system apart after the devotional. It was really nice to talk to someone from the outside world about something other than missionary work.

Janice Kapp Perry gave the Tuesday devotional last Tuesday. That was really, really cool.

That's about all the news from The MTC this week. Exciting times for everyone involved. Can't wait to get out of here.

The "by no means a role play," "real" investigator we've been teaching for the past three weeks turned out to be 100% a role play. Thanks MTC. In all seriousness though, he's a really cool guy. It turns out he served in Montreal speaking Mandarin, so we had a really long talk about the mission and the culture of the area. It was really cool. I'm stoked to get out.

Love you all. Hope your Thanksgivings were just as exciting as mine was.

Elder Hadden

Hey! guess what! I actually remembered my camera this week.

Elder Chan and me with Daniel Black (our "by no means a role play" investigator)

Our District With 2 of our teachers (left to right: Elder Mitchell, Elder Stubbs, Elder McKean, Elder Chan, me, Tan Laoshi, Elder Airoso, Sister Rafie, Hong DiXiong, Sister Miller, Elder Turcotte, Elder Biehler)