오캐.

It was a good week this week. All desire to write this email suddenly left me, so I apologize if it's lame. 지겹다.

This week contained the biggest holiday, which is the Korean New Year! "Korean New Year" sounds like it should be some super awesome festival with giant dragons and enormously colorful fireworks and people wearing weird Asian clothes and using chopsticks. All are false except for the chopsticks. The Korean New Year consists of going to your hometown and making and eating lots of food, similar to the American Thanksgiving. But in Korea, there's a HUGE emphasis on ancestors and respect for their elders. Families gather together, the wives make food, the children play, and the men get wasted drunk. It's a pretty good holiday. But there's no fireworks or anything, so that's kind of a letdown.

Making pot stickers. "Mandoo" in Korean.

For the Korean New Year, we got to go to Seoul and have a mission conference on Thursday. It was awesome. Wednesday night, we did a session at the temple and then slept there. Thursday was filled with listening to President and his Wife speak and a few musical numbers. The President's wife Sister Christensen decided that she wanted to put together a band for the conference, so I got to play the trumpet! It's been a LONG time. But I managed to squeak out enough notes so it didn't sound awful. :)

My trumpet. She's not as good as my one at home, but she played just fine.

Transfer calls came! Elder Murdock is leaving to Nokbun, which is in Seoul and the ward has over 100 members. It's HUGE. And I will be training!!! I'm going to get a brand new missionary and teach him the ropes!! It's going to be awesome. I'm really excited. I'll stay here in Wonju and train for probably the next 12 week (a regular training period time). I'm really looking forward to it. I'll drop Elder Murdock off and pick up my new missionary on Thursday morning! 

Life is good, and so is Korea!

Love, Elder Edwards

This is the mountain man that I talked to last week. Elder Murdock took some candid pictures. That's me! Doing real missionary work, speaking real (I hope) Korean! Cool, huh?