Pizza and Plastic

Today we will go to a fancy Italian restaurant because during lunch time for only 110 dollars you can order as much pizza as you can eat (order too much and they'll charge you though). It looks like it's going to be really good pizza, and the cheapest one is 110 anyway, so if we can each eat at least one full pizza, it will be worth it. I can eat at least a pizza in two and a half hours. Hopefully it will be able to tide me over for another few months of no p712.

Yesterday I kicked a fan over as I walked out of a room. It started making the DAACK DAACK DAACK of plastic blades against metal cage. Acting quickly I reached down to pick it up. In my mind (or maybe my spine, where reflexes come from), if I grabbed the cage, my fingers would be on the outside, and the blade would be on the inside. Hitting the cage, but inside it. For the most part that's what happened. But the fleshy pad of my right middle finger squeezed its little self through the bars of protection to the place where all the noise was coming from. I am now one finger print short of a full unique individual, but I think I'll get by. At least it wasn't my thumb, which I'll need if I want to go back to Hong Kong.

Did I ever tell about that? It's so much fun. After you get off the boat from Macao you have to go through customs, but since I have a Hong Kong ID card, I get to do the cool ones. First I stick my ID card into a slot. It reads it for a minute and then spits it back out. When I take my card, the first doors open and wait for me to enter. Once I'm inside, they close behind me. I then place my thumb on the little scanner thing to get it read. As long as I'm me or still have my full thumb print, the doors in front of me open, and I enter Hong Kong. I don't know what happens if I'm not me. It's probably scary.

I've gotten a lot better at ping pong here. Most Chinese people can still beat me, but I at least score some. Yesterday the senior missionary Elder asked if I'd like to play him. He's probably in his sixties and getting rather portly, so I admit I wasn't expecting the walloping I received. He owned me, man.

There is an Indonesian member here, Eni, waiting for a visa to go back to Hong Kong, so she has nothing to do really. So she, another Indonesian who has two week's holiday, and a Phillipeno who is looking for a job, spend as much time as they can finding with us. It's so crazy. Every day they ask if and when we're going finding. When we're done and have to go do other things they say "Ok, well maybe we'll just stay here and keep on finding, ok?" Of course it's ok. Please, please do it.

Now I'd like to tell a sad story about Elder Wright. When he was young, his mother made him lunch every day for school. Every day, from preschool on, pudding, fruit leather, juice, and his favorite kind of sandwich. One day, in third grade, she asked him on the way home from school, "Did you enjoy your lunch today?" "Yep! I ate it all up! It was so good!" He said. Later that day, she noticed he had left his lunch box in the car. When she picked it up to bring it inside, she found that he had not eaten his sandwich.

"McKay,why didn't you eat your sandwich? You love this kind of sandwich!" Turns out he couldn't get it out of the plastic wrap. He had been surviving on fruit leather and pudding for years. Now his mother understood why he always asked for extra fruit leather.

So she showed him exactly how she wrapped it, and said she would do it the same way everyday so that he could get it out. But the next day, he still couldn't do it. It just wouldn't come off. "Well," he thought, "I do love this sandwich, and my mom will be sad if I don't eat it."

So he did. Plastic wrap and all. Every day.

And the moral of the story is, don't be too nice. Don't just pretend there is no problem. Fix your problems.

I love you all

-Noah