That means a happy new years for everyone but missionaries really. New years is great, but that means everyone and their dog go to mainland or are just SUPER busy. I mean it is a good travel and a good busy. New Years is a holiday all about family. Usually it is like 5 days long, but people can really only afford 3 days off from work. The first day they visit the husbands side of the family, the second they visit the wives side of the family and the third day/ rest of the time they visit other random family. Thats why so many of them need to go to mainland. To Baailihn (visit family).
People who are married have to pass out red pocket filled with money to people. Missionaries are not really supposed to take them, but when we do (cause sometimes you will offend people if you don't) we just take the money and donate it to the mission fund. But it is still fun to get them. :)
There is some very special unique New Years food. Raddish cake for example. Most of the new years food is cake, but not like cake cake. It is more like a mashed potato bar, like the texture of a brownie. Then they have all kinds of other unique cake dishes. They are very....... unique. We haven't eaten to many of them since the new rule that we have to have an investigator or LA in order to eat with any of our members.
New years is BEAUTIFUL. Everyone cleans their houses and buys flowers. Each kind of flower has a different meaning. Some bring good fortune, some bring love. all different kinds!
Everyone as we go through the streets when we say "San lihn faai lohk!" (Happy new years!) They say "San tai gihn hong!" (Healthy Body!) or "Gung hei faat choi!" (Good Fortune!) I think that I am going to start saying that in America when people say happy new years. HEALTHY BODY! hahaha. It might not work in English, but it is perfect in Chinese.
So we haven't been able to see many of our investigators this week since they were all gone, so we spent some time Ding dong ditching our LAs. .....
But we left gifts of fruit with some notes that we tried to write in Chinese. Ding dong ditching in Hong Kong is kinda hard. It goes down like this. : We are on the 24th floor. The door is open, but the gate (cause every house in HK has a gate) is closed, we can hear the TV on, the people are right on the inside, so what do we do?.... slip the bag of fruit on the gate handle, yell "WAIH! LEIH HOU!" and then we book it out of there. we were to scared to wait for the elevator a couple of times so we took the stairs down a couple flights.
We don't do this for to many of our LAs. These were just a couple that last time we tried to visit, the response wasn't to warm. So we thought they could use a wee bit of New Years love. Hopefully next time we visit they will be a bit warmer. :)
Ok... well I love you all SO much!
Hong Kong is great! Missionary work is still the best thing in the world!
We found some Turkish Delights in the grocery store last Monday. We had to try them and have a Narnia Party. :)
We finally got our NEW TAGS!!!! I almost peed my skirt of excitement when I saw them.
the market of flowers that we had no idea was going on till it was to late. I could only snap one picture on our way home. so sad
Vanessa (our investigator, who is AWESOME!) as a child around New Years. ALL the kids around here wear cute traditional things for new years. They are so cute I am tempted to get some for my future kids.
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