I Went Back to the US

Dear all,

We had a pretty interesting week this week. A lot of stuff happened all at the same time. 

Last Tuesday, Elder Gauthier and I got a special inside tour of the US embassy from a member who works there. Elder Gauthier wants to be a French diplomat when he goes home, so he was super excited to see all the diplomatty stuff going on. We even saw the ambassador. It was really interesting, and nice to take a short trip back to the US. 

Saturday we had our transfer call. I will be staying in Dow's Lake and receiving a Tahitian companions who's even newer than me, so I'll be the senior companion. He doesn't speak any Chinese, so I'll be teaching all of our Chinese investigators.I will also be the district leader for the Dow's Lake district. President gave me a ton of responsibility out of nowhere, but I'm pretty excited to be a mission leader. I really enjoyed being a leader at camp and in other situations, so now I'm excited to keep going with that. Elder Gauthier extended his mission and is going back to Montreal for his last 6 weeks. Elder Leung and Elder Burton (my elementary school buddy) are coming to Ottawa to be the Chinese speakers in my district.

This Sunday was the fabled Canada Day. I had the great experience of singing "O Canada" in Sacrament meeting. Elder Gauthier and I both didn't know the words so we had to have one of the members give us her phone so we could sing along. Everyone laughed at us for being not Canadian, but it was all good. 

Later that night, we listened to the music blasting through downtown Ottawa, the jet-flyovers, and all the drunk people walking on the street below. At one point we got sick of stewing in our sweltering apartment and decided to go "finding" so we could see what was going on. We walked about a block away from the Parliament building before turning around because there were too many people and it wasn't that interesting. I'll send pictures in another email.

I love you all! I'll let you know how it goes with all the changes this week.

Elder Hadden