July 5

Today I had a lunch meeting with some of the faculty members at National Taiwan Normal University. This is one of the premier universities in Taiwan, so I was really happy that I was going to be able to meet with them. 

Prior to that meeting we went to the temple and mission office again. I was able to show our children what the mission office looked like and tell them a little bit about it from when I was a missionary. We then walked to the big park and Rebecca and the children played on the toys there and ate lunch while I went to my meeting. 

The faculty members that I met were all very nice and even though we didn’t talk specifics about collaborating on certain projects, they made sure to let me know that they would be interested in collaborating and that I would be welcomed to come back and present at their university any time that I would like. 

After that meeting I went back to the park and found Rebecca and we walked to the temple so that she could do a temple session. While she was in the temple, I took the children back around the mission office. We happened to run into some elders and sisters that had just gotten out of a training meeting and they showed us around a little more. It was fun to hear about the different areas that they are serving in and to hear about how the church is growing. For example, we ran into the sisters who are serving in Guishan, which is the first area where I served during my mission. My companion and I were the first missionaries to serve in that area and during the three months that I was there only one person decided to get baptized. However, Guishan now has its own ward. 

While touring around the mission office I was also able to get my hands on a copy of the Doctrine and Covenants that has each page split into three columns, one for the Chinese, one for the English, and one for the Romanization of the Chinese. I really wanted a copy of the Book of Mormon like that, but they were all out and not printing them any more since they are redoing the Chinese translation. With our remaining time waiting for Rebecca we went back to the Chaing Kai-Shek memorial park and played around there. 

After picking Rebecca up from the temple, we found a place to eat and made our way back home. That night, Rebecca put the children to bed while I went back to the temple to do baptisms for some family names that I recently looked up. I really enjoyed being in that temple. There were some neat Chinese paintings. It was also funny to see the one who was doing the baptisms really struggle with the English names that I brought, even though they were pretty standard ones like Frank and Fred.

Outside of the temple.




The mission office. It is the same building and everything from 20 years ago when I was a missionary. The top two or three floors are the mission president's home, then the fourth floor is the mission office, then the bottom three floors are now housing for people who are attending the temple from afar. When I was a missionary those bottom three floors were the distribution center and other offices and there was a separate building for the temple housing. However, they took that building down when they built the new chapel next to the temple.



Back at the Chaing Kai-Shek memorial park.





Waiting for dinner.




The kids all liked the fried rice here and Rebecca and I really liked the orange chicken that we got. The orange sauce had a really good flavor to it - seemed much more fresh than the orange chicken sauce that you can get at Chinese restaurants in the U.S.