Nui Tram

Title:      Nui = Mountain

                Tram = The name

               This = The View.

We revisited a favorite spot with beautiful views for our p-day this week: Nui Tram, and Chua Tram, the pagoda at the base of the mountain, and the cave where Ho Chi Minh is said to have lived for a time. We were there last April and liked it so much, we wanted to share it with more missionaries.

The weather was a bit cooler (only high 80s), so we took the chance to go out hiking, and it paid off. We started at the cave at the base of the mountain, enjoying the cool and the bats. 

We did more exploring this time, going further back into the cave where it was darker and wetter, and more bending over was required. We actually had to be more careful this time--we found tunnels that wound past pits with water and a small lake, none of which I remember from the first time we went here.

Elder Anderton swore bats were flying past his hair and then out the round hole across the room.

Spelunking Vietnamese style...

                             This was a statue of Uncle Ho (Ho Chi Minh).

The pagoda outside of the cave is still under construction, but there are old buildings all around.

And then we carried on hiking...

We bush-wacked a bit, but made it to the top of the ridge, and it was worth the effort.

Chi Duong and Chi Tuyet...

Anh Ca Anderton and Anh Ca Nguyen...

We finished the day with a late lunch at Pho Cao Gia, one of our favorite restaurants, and then rested up.

Tuesday was to be our final district council as a district, or so our surmising went--and turned out to be true. So brownies with whipped cream made it to the table after all the training was finished. I am not above buying the love of our missionaries. :P 

Tuesday night is Game Night, so in the spirit of "well, we may not be together for long so let's make sure Ong-Ba Adams have tried shrimp paste with their dinner", we went to dinner together at a place that served Bun Dau Met.

The meal consisted of fried tofu, fish, spring rolls, sausage, pork slices, clumps of noodles, and 2 sauces for dipping--one of which is the shrimp paste sauce and one was fish sauce, I believe. 

Let's just say that it could have been worse. We may never order it again, although I quite liked the fish and the tofu and the spring rolls...

Walking back to the church is always interesting--some nights have more traffic than others. This wasn't too bad tonight.

The street vendors sometimes have very colorful foods. Some native missionaries ordered some once and even they didn't know what it was they ordered.

Down an alley and across a narrow bridge over a smelly river, past the beer hall (outdoor), down the street, and there's the church.

Wednesday was a great storm day.

Thursday was English activity and ended with the popular game of stealing chairs (Fruit Basket Upset). Thursday was also the anniversary of our arrival in Vietnam 1 year ago!  Woot! Woot! We had to celebrate, of course, which we did!!

Friday was YSA, where we played Pictionary with our small group of missionaries and small group of branch members and even smaller group of "friends". It was still fun.

Saturday was our busy day, made especially busy because Allen and I were asked to present at a district YSA conference about the temple. Our portion was on How to Prepare or What to do to Prepare Before Going to the Temple. It took us some good pondering and planning to prepare for our presentation, but it was well-received. Allen put together a good power-point that included a picture of us on our wedding day outside of the Provo Temple, which got a lot of oohs and aahs, obviously because we look so much the same today as we did back then! 

Going to the temple is something that I feel is easy to take for granted back in the U.S. and some other parts of the world, so it was interesting to discuss something so important and yet so difficult to achieve in this and some other countries.

Sunday was another busy and lovely day! It began well with visitors to sacrament meeting who came to attend their brother/uncle's baptism right after church. It's so fun to have family come! And then Allen and I taught Sunday School and wished we had prepared a little better, but I think Zion's Camp was interesting enough to save us.

The BIG event was the baptism of Chu Vu (Chu is one word for "uncle", which they call anyone older than themselves, and so it's what the missionaries call Vu, the man being baptized). Vu has been taught for many months, and has been attending meetings for a long time and knows the gospel well. It's so wonderful to hear his comments in a church meeting and they're such good comments that show a good understanding of the gospel. He will be a great asset to our Hai Ba Trung Branch.

Here is Vu, bearing his testimony as a member for the first time. 

A picture with Allen, AC Anderton, a nephew, a son, Vu, AC Nguyen, 2 branch members, and a brother.

A picture of Vu with our district missionaries.

Allen and I brought a small picture of Christ and a CTR ring (the Vietnamese version is CDD) for each member baptized into our branch.

This is Vu's brother and nephew.

Directly following the baptism was our Branch potluck, so that was perfect timing for a celebration!

The branch provides a birthday cake for anyone with a birthday during that month. There were none! So Sister Tuyet celebrated her October birthday early. 

At the end of the day, we celebrated with one more special dinner. We were losing 2 of the missionaries from our district so we needed to send them off with our love and one last dinner at our apartment. They came over at 4:30 pm for the Departing Devotional, where the missionaries who finished their mission in this transfer (there were 3 of them) have the opportunity to bear testimony for the last time and leave parting advice. Two of these missionaries were especially dear to us, as they had served in Hai Ba Trung with us a few months ago. After the devotional, we had our spaghetti dinner and apple cake.

And THAT is how we roll!

I believe that Allen has figured out the problem with the blog not working, so future blogs should be on time! 

Which also means that unless I'm too exhausted this weekend, the next edition will be out soon!

We are in the midst of a weakened typhoon that was supposed to have dumped rain on us this weekend, and the tail of it is supposed to dump rain on us at the beginning of next week. We'll see what happens.

I'll save more details for that next blog, and hope to leave you in suspense... of some kind!

Be safe! Be well!