Last week

Eric e-mailed us last week with the news that a number of new Mandarin-speaking (actually Mandarin-learning) missionaries had entered the MTC. One of them, Elder Liu, is going to the England Leeds Mission. His parents are Taiwanese, but he has spent most or all of his life in the US, and English is his primary language. Eric expects that his Mandarin will progress rapidly, however. Given the small number of Mandarin-speaking missionaries in their mission, I would expect Eric and Elder Liu to be paired as companions at some point in their missions. This will no doubt be a good learning experience for Eric, both in terms of culture and language.

Eric also mentioned that he had received a letter from the 18-year-old sister of one of his fellow missionaries. Apparently, he has been teased unmercifully about that. No word on whether he wrote back.

He's apparently getting pretty ambitious, because he asked us to send him a book on how to write Chinese characters. The missionaries study the language using what is called pinyin, which is essentially a phonetic version of Chinese using the roman alphabet. They aren't required to learn to read or write Chinese characters, but Eric is apparently interested in doing so anyway. We found a few books, and will be sending him one for his birthday.

Speaking of his birthday (it's on September 14th for anyone who doesn't know), we still haven't heard anything about his travel arrangements to England. We expect him to be leaving the MTC sometime between September 9th and September 17th, so we don't know if he'll spend his birthday in Utah or England. We are sending his birthday stuff early to make sure he gets it before he leaves (lots cheaper and faster to mail stuff to Utah than England). You can leave birthday wishes as comments to this post, and we will print them out and include them in our box. Thanks for that.