Elder Noah Goo: Taiwan Tapei Mission, September 2020 to September 2022

 大家好! Wow, it's crazy that I've been out here one week already. I flew out on Tuesday and I was with a bunch of people from my district so it was fun until I left with my new companions. That first night felt so weird as I was laying in a new bed surrounded by strangers. As many of you know I'm pretty quiet especially around new people haha. It'll still take some more time to adjust but I'm getting used to living with my companions and working as a missionary. First time meeting my companions I'm in a trio so my trainer is Elder Vos and then we also have Elder Lopez. They're both super cool and have been out here for about 4 months now. Elder Vos has pretty good Chinese but we're all still new so we don't quite understand everything people say haha. I realized that I actually learned quite a bit of vocabulary in the MTC but now I need to work on fluency and understanding others. We split our branch with another Chinese trio and we do a lot of stuff w...

 大家好! Wow, I'm finally done with MTC. It's been an amazing nine weeks and I've learned and grown so much. At first, I was nervous for online MTC, but it's been so much better than I thought. I've been able to feel the Spirit every day Last two classes and just have fun with my district. Even over zoom our district became such good friends and I'm thankful for their strong testimonies. My teachers were so amazing and I'm grateful for them in helping me get to where I am now. It's starting to get real that I leave next week because I've been gathering my stuff and packing up my room. I'll get to be on a flight with some people from my district including Jackson 长老 so I'm excited for that. My Chinese isn't great haha and I still have a lot to learn but I'm so excited to get out there and just start. I will say nine weeks of being at home, while great, seemed to take forever haha. One of my teachers 李老师 said that we have grown out of our...

 大家好! Wow, I can't believe I only have one week left of MTC. It seems like just yesterday I was starting class for the first time. I am ready to move on though and I'm super excited to go to California. President Durham (San Francisco/Oakland Mission President) had all of the missionaries arriving on Nov 24 get on a Zoom call with him this week. I think there's about 26 new missionaries heading there and for all of them, besides the 9 from my district, it's their original assignment. I learned that our mission has 11 different languages which is so crazy. He also told us that we'd most likely be able to have Mandarin-speaking trainers so I was really excited to hear that. Even though we'll be quarantined for two weeks I'll be able to practice my 中文 so that's awesome. Last week me and Jackson 长老 taught the other Mandarin speaker for our TRC. He was a lot harder to teach because he spoke a lot more and used more words we didn't know so it was harder to...

 大家好! As most of you know I got a new reassignment this week. I'm now going to the California Oakland/San Francisco Mission! I'm super excited because there will be a lot more opportunities to use and practice Chinese. I'm also glad it won't be as cold as Denver haha. I'm now leaving on Nov 24 which was my original date to leave. It's good for me because I didn't know what I was going to do for the week where I had no MTC or anything. Still so crazy that I'll finally be heading out in a little over two weeks. Also, all the other missionaries from my district that live in Utah got reassigned to Oakland. The other four that are out of state all got assigned to Utah missions so we think it has to do something with our visas. The visa lady emailed most of us who live in Utah and told us to get the final parts of our visa done. We had to do some medical stuff at the BYU Health Center and now that that's finished they are processing our visas! I'm stil...

大家好! Not gonna lie, this week started out pretty slow. After being in online MTC for so many weeks I've gotten to the point where I just really want to head out to the mission field. I have friends who just barely started MTC or are starting soon and will go out before I do so that's kinda depressing for me. I'm still excited to learn and grow during this last month of MTC and I love bonding with my amazing 地区 (district). Me and Jackson 长老 (Elder) have now taught two TRCs in all Chinese. They've been with the same person (there's only two total Chinese speakers for TRCs) which has been good for us because we could actually build off our previous lesson and not just teach the same thing every time. They actually went pretty good though and both times we did better than we thought we did. The guy we taught was super nice and helpful and would slow his speaking or kinda act out what he was saying when we didn't understand haha. I feel like I'm catching up to my...

 大家好! I got my reassignment this week! I'll be going to the Colorado Denver  North Mission on December 2nd. There's a couple other missionaries from my district going there and I'm super excited. I still hope I get to go to  Taiwan relatively quickly. I'm starting to get together all my luggage and finish up some stuff and it makes it feel a lot more real haha. I know I  still have a while but I can't believe I finished my 5th week and am now past the halfway mark. The weeks have gone by so fast but at the same time, each day seems really slow. I've been a missionary for a full month now which seems like forever. I'm doing good though and I keep learning and growing every day. This week I focused a lot more on my daily planning because I felt like I was kind of struggling with it. Instead of setting aside just general blocks of time, I decided to plan smaller increments of time with specific things to do and goals. This turned out to help me so much more and...

 大家好! I'm sorry I forgot to write last week, I didn't have any time on my P-day. Thank you to all who came to my farewell or watched it online! It was good to see you all. It's been a good couple weeks and I can't believe I'm almost halfway done with MTC (I just finished week 4). We took a language assessment this week and I realized that even though I'm memorizing tons of words, I struggle a lot at creating sentences quickly and sounding more fluid. My goal now is to practice creating sentences as I learn new words so hopefully, I can improve overall. We've been doing a lot of practice teaching basic lessons in Chinese. I feel like me and my companion have a pretty good flow between the two of us so it's been pretty good so far even though we can't go deeper into most subjects. We've had a lot of problems with TRCs though haha. We had signed up for one this past Tuesday but we never got the email with the link or bio so we never got to do it. Th...