yay!!! new area!!!

We continue to be so proud of this kid- always amazed at his goals and the things that you can tell are so important to him. He is obviously still our Scott, but has grown so so much in the past 5 months. The countdown till Mother's day and our next chance to talk to him over the phone begins!! 109 days =)

Also don't forget Scott's birthday is March 2nd- I'm sure any cards from his adoring fans would be appreciated! 
-Lindsay

Hey President!
This week has been good as always.  For personal study, I've really been going through PMG and the Liahona issues a lot recently.  I think on some level I just got a little burnt out on the scripture language for a little bit and just wanted some more modern wordings.  It's been super good, it was the first time I read an issue of a church magazine all the way through which was super cool.
As far as investigators go, coming into this new area, we had one investigator and he got baptized on saturday, and comfirmed sunday.  He is a pretty great guy, and I think he really wants his head to be set in the right direction.  He has some problems, I think they mostly just fall to the fact that he speaks English really well and doesn't really understand what swearing is that much in English, but aside from that he's pretty great!
One miracle that I saw this week occurred yesterday in church.  I had never blessed the sacrament before in Korean, and the fact that I was able to say the prayer correctly really was a blessing.  I was pretty nervous at first, but it turned out to be just fine.  I think as I serve here in 산본, I might need to look a little more to little things for miracles, just because the ward is so small and we have no investigator pool whatsoever.  I look forward to progressing the area more!

-Elder Clawson

The news is out!

I'm in a new area!  This new area as you may have read earlier is called 산본.  I'm somewhat tempted to not tell you guys how to actually pronounce it.  It's a little more fun that way, and then Brother Lanier could be able to read it and like blackmail people so they could know how to pronounce my new area, but I feel like that's a little bit ridiculous.  It's pronounced san-bon when directly romanized.  It's a fun area and we have ZERO investigators.  It's so great!  Just gives us more opportunity to try and meet more of Heavenly Father's children I suppose.

This area is pretty great I suppose.  It's ridiculous the amount of apartment buildings that they have here.  My last area was pretty city-ified for the most part, and this is too, but I would aline it more with a suburb.  SOOOOOOO many apartments, each of which having a couple hundred apartments probably.  It's crazy.  CRAZY awesome.  I don't know why I keep on throwing in those moments of random excitement, it's kind of beyond me haha.  So yes, this area has a whole bunch of apartments, our house is really nice though!  Random tangents for the win.  Our house is a little smaller than the last, but I like it more.  It's warmer, and has a washer-dryer combo for laundry!  So cool!  I don't know if I had said so before, but usually you have to hang up your clothes to dry in Korea, but not here!

My new companion's name is 이준석.  He is what is called 교포 which means that he is Korean, but lived in America or just elsewhere aside from Korea.  He is more than fluent in Korean, and speaks English just as well, so that's super convenient for me.  His name is pronounced ee-joon-suk in romanized Korean.  He would go by the last name Lee in america, so he shares the same last name with just about half of this country.  He's been out in the field for a year longer than me, but since he spoke Korean before his mission, he only had to stay in the MTC for like half the time that I did, so he's like 11 months older than me in the mission.  It seems like the two of us will get along pretty well, and it's just te two of us in our house again.  I might get a little frustrated if I only live in two man houses my whole mission.  The thought has entered my mind yes hahaha

The new ward is pretty tiny.  Yesterday at church we had about 30 people I think.  That's why my compnion and I ended up blessing the sacrament, giving talks, and he taught gospel principles class.  I get to teach it in 2 weeks...  So exciting!!!!!  Truth be told that might be a little bit of a nightmare hahaha.  Oh yeah, we have no investigators now, but we had one 3 days ago.  I got another walk in baptism that I feel like I did nothing for haha.  He's a pretty cool guy though, same age as me in Korean, and I guess in American age for the next couple months until my birthday, we would have been in different grades though.  We do a whole bunch of calling old records right now just to try and find someone to talk to that we might be able to possibly, maybe, perhaps meet.  And then get punked...

Fun news!!! There's this lady in the new ward, who I swear is a Korean rendition of Janet Williams!  It's crazy!  I first saw her and was tripped out for a second, I was thinking to myself "you speak Korean too and shrunk 4 inches and now have children that are 2 and 4 again?"  It was an interesting experience to say the least.

For Korean time I think I may have to do a bit of contemplation...  I'm going to teach you my least favorite word in the Korean language!

빨리  (bah-lee)

This directly translates to "quickly", but it is usually contextually used more to mean "hurry".  I have come to discover that I hate the word hurry... I just feel like it's something that shouldn't be in a missionary's vocabulary.  Anyways sometimes I say it to make fun of myself though for my unreasonable feelings towards the word hahaha.  Koreans also like repetition so if you repeat it a couple times that's pretty Korean too hahaha

I can't think of much else to talk about the new area, it's pretty awesome and I hope that it continues to be pretty cool in the future.  It may be hard here, but you can't grow from something that is overly easy.

Have an awesome week and I love you guys!  You're all awesome!

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