Sleepover in the Gym!

Ok, not really. But pretty much. So this one day at about 9:55 (we get home at 9:30 and go to bed at 10:30) we're just having a nice snack before bed, and....the fire alarm goes off. So all these girls start swarming out of their rooms in a mix of pjs, bathrobes, missionary clothes, no shoes, slippers... It was hilarious and awful and awesome at the same time. Each building is huge, so there were tons of girls. So we go outside and are huddling to stay warm and singing to stay sane, then someone came and opened up the gym for us (it was locked) So we sat in the gym and it was really adorable because you could see all the districts/zones together in little circles. It was like a sleepover for a half hour until we could go back to the building. But it was pretty exciting!

Earlier this week we got our Chinese name tags!

(Our tags now have Chinese for the name of the Church but our English name) So that's exciting! But we're not allowed to wear them until we go to Taiwan.

So in the MTC when your learning a language we do something called SYL (Speak your language); we're supposed to speak as much Chinese as we know how in our everyday conversation; it helps us learn it faster. But it's super hard! So we continually make goals to help us do this. This week we made a goal to only speak Chinese on Friday; no English at all. :/ But it actually was super cool! We made it the first half of the day! But it was so hard and exhausting and we kind of gave up the second half of the day. So we're going to try it again throughout the week at different times. It's kind of cool not speaking English.

St Patrick's Day was Monday! It was....pretty much a normal day. Except we got to decorate cookies at dinner! So that was fun. 

We do this thing every week where volunteers come in and we teach them (in Chinese) they're usually members of the Church and we just talk with them. Last week we taught this guy and his 3 little kids; they all spoke Chinese! The kids are in this immersion program at school, how cool is that. And the 12 year old was definitely better than us. Embarrassing. (The little 7 year old was so cute! But I digress...) This week we started skyping real live Chinese people. Which really freaked us out. But we survived. And it was so cool! And she was so nice!

Each Sunday and Tuesday we have a Devotional with the whole campus and a guest speaker comes. This Tuesday's was really good. He talked about the concept of how big and vast the universe is and showed a clip to emphasis that. Then he showed a clip showing how perfect the Earth is, how everything is perfectly situated and organized to function perfectly for us to live here. I did not give these clips justice and I'm sorry. But the point was that God created this world for us. And even though we are nothing; we are a speck in this universe, God loves me enough to make this world. He loves you enough to make this world. And He knows each of us individually and perfectly. It's just amazing! And comforting to know that. I hope you feel of God's love for you, and my love. I know he cares about YOU and your success.

Only a couple more weeks until I'm off to Taiwan! Hopefully we'll get our travel plans in a week or two, I'll let you know!

Thanks for all the support love and prayers!

-Sister Biancardi