Flub-a-dub-dub! [week 28]

Hi! My name is Truman Renfroe. I'm a missionary for the church of Jesus Christ of latter day Saints. And I'm serving in the Korea Seoul South Mission. My mission is cooler than your mission.

I watched conference all this and last week. Wow. It's like it was meant for me and all my fellow missionaries and prospective missionaries. Just serve. Wow that sounds like a title to a terrible youth album song. (I know putting terrible and youth album in the same sentence is redundant, but that's OK I didn't want there to be any confusion.) OK but conference! Wasn't it amazing? Man I loved it. I thought it would be sad to not have crepes and Legos, as is the tradition in my home, but I was able to focus on every jot and tittle 100% of the time. It was so good. I'm going to re-listen to it at least twice all the way through by next conference. I can't wait. OH! I still have to watch the Sunday afternoon session. That'll be splendid! 

My cousin just gave his farewell talk and is going to serve in the Zimbabwe mission pretty soon. Go him. Also Joe Torman and Joe Nielsen are serving their missions pretty soon, AND my cousin Ben is serving a mission right now. What a bunch of cool cats and kittens they all are. 

Yeah conference was great. Serve a mission and be a good person and come closer to Christ and do t stress because God has a plan just for you. 

A super cool guy named Joshua 증 watched conference with us and he had a plethora of piñatas, and questions. And sister Banks had a plethora of metaphorical baseball bats to beat the ever living metaphorical saltwater taffies out of the piñata questions. Metaphorically that is. That didn't make sense, let me explain. 

Piñata=question

Baseball bat=answer

salt water taffy=disgusting candy that comes out of a cardboard emaciated donkey like blood comes out of a real emaciated donkey. But in this metaphor it also equals the happy ending of having all the questions answered. 

Ah... Clarity. 

Yeah Joshua wants to attend in person in six months, and he said he would watch the other three sessions on his own. What a stud. 

Today I'm going to play basketball with the office elders. There's three of them with me and my companion that makes five. After I write "my companion" this emoji 💕 shows up. That's special. 

Allright I love you guys. Serve a mission and watch conference. Love you my companions. 💋💖💕💗💞

PICTURES!

There is a church with a mural of Jesus. There are a TON of churches here. You can see three crosses from any given window with a big view. 

A selfie of me with a picture of ME!

There is a statue of a Christmas minotaur.

The picture of the wall with random stuff on it has a funny sign with a stressed mom and her bratty kids. That is frowned upon.

There are some Yukio cards. Neat.

Basket ball with the 선교사 😁

What's crackalackin? [week 27]

My BUDDIES! heh-hehe-HEH-hello! What's crackalackin? Hey you want to know a secret? Well too bad I can keep a secret, so you don't get to know my super juicy desirable secret. 

OH-KAY what did I do that was worthy of noteworthyness? Let me cogitate for one second. OK last Saturday we had ourselves a party. We played high-school assembly-esque party games. Like the put your hand in this cardboard box and tell us what cold spaghetti feels like game. And we played some get to know you games and some charade variants. The people that came is what made it weird. Because if your with a good group of friends you could play candy land and still have a euphoric experience. We had missionaries of every age rank and gender, and teaching friends of every age rank and gender. So there were like mini cliques within the event, but it still ended up being fun. I got to know a cool yet different teaching friend named Makenzie. She is an English teacher from America, she likes theater and ice cream, and she was absolutely incredible at charades. Good job Makenzie. And I got to be better friends with 이선현. (Elder sun hyeon.) It was a success. 42/42 for sure and for certain. 

There is all the party people on the gym on the green floor. It was lit. 

I have a neighbor Harmonie (grandma 할머니) who had kids that lived in America, and they were taken care of by their neighbors, so she wants to return the favor by feeding any Americans on her floor. She made us some delicious curry. It was so good. 

Guys help me out. Is "lip service" an English phrase? A Korean said I was giving'em "lip service" when I was brown nosing. If it is an English phrase then its going to be used at every possible opportunity because it's the most incredible thing I've heard in my entire mission. If it's like a konglish phrase, then I will also still use it all the time, but with a Korean accent. 

It's good to be able to speak well enough to laugh with Koreans. That's my love language. LAUGHING. So it's nice to be able to laugh and get to know some people here. I think it's the first step in missionary work. Making friends. 

Alllllright I love you guys, you have a jolly fan-flippn-tactic week. Watch conference! I'm going to next week because thats when the Korean version comes out. I'm still watching it in English though. OK love you bye.

PICTURES!

My new best friend, "Lil Aang." He has all the answers. I got him at the Buddhist temple last week. Maybe I'll take more pictures and send them on over in another email... OK that's what I'll do, but that means I'm going to make this email the "reply all" type because it takes 30 minutes to add all my many faithful followers the other way. So be careful of what you click. 😚

The next picture (Well who knows what order these will be in after I send them?) Is some scrumptious cold meat sticks. I live Korean food, but so many fast foods and really tasty looking stuff is served cold or at room temperature. I always take most street food home to microwave it before consumption.

There is a picture of what appears to be a hot dog in a large bun with some frosted flakes and cheese on it. It's GRRRRREAT!

Then there is a selfie of me being super cheerful and patriotic. God bless America 🇺🇸 and South Korea too

Another Episode of Missionary with Missionary [week 22]

Well hello you lovely lot. welcome to another episode of missionary with missionary. Episode 42: the answer to life the universe and everything. So since we have last corresponded, many things have corresponded. My companion and I got ourselves a nice man to commit to being baptized on march 26th of 2022. What a cool guy he is. His name is 병춘 Byung Choon He is in his fifties and speaks fluent English. He lived in the states for 20 years. He has been binge-listening to the Book of Mormon and is through Second Nephi after only one week of reading. What a cool guy. 

There is an election going on in Korea right now. There is a red side and a blue side. There are cars with huge megaphones on top, driving around screaming to "Vote for the blue guy" or "No vote for the red guy!" And there was a cool rally type of deal on the way to the grocery store there were tons of people lined up on the sidewalk dancing to a political song written about their politician. There were two of them one block apart. One was red and kind of hyped-up angry sounding, and the other was blue and chill out sounding. It was neat. I want to say who I want to win, but I haven't read so much as a news paper or Wikipedia article about Korean politics, so I'm going to not vote. President Nelson seems to be a solid guy. I'll listen to what he has to say. 

Oh! Guess what? We got transfer calls yesterday. I'm going to be leaving Nonsan, and moving to Boondong! My new companion's name is Elder Carter. Seems like a nice guy from what I can tell by his picture. He is the Zone leader for the Gyonggi zone. That means I'll get to go on some sweet exchanges every once in a while. 

I had a lot of pizza this week. Let me tell you about that. This is interesting. 

• SO! The first stuff we had was grocery store pizza. It was frozen, so we had to unfreeze it by putting it in a microwave oven. And THEN we ate the pizza. It was a couple clicks under ok. Like if I was very hungry and everything tastes better, then it would be like a 5/10. 
• Then we got free dominos pizza the same day from a friend of the last missionaries that served here. It was DELICIOUS. I wish I was more hungry. It was more of the shepherd's-pie-type pizza. It has more cheese and less potatoes than shepherds pie, and it has pizza crust and is served in flat triangles instead of thick squares. 
• AND THEN! The next day we met with some other elders after district council and went and got some pizza. It was gross. The normal pizza was lacking in all three basic ingredients: being bread, cheese, and tomato sauce. And the crazy Korean pizza was like one centimeter of bread and an inch and a half of cheese. It tasted good as I was eating it, but then one elder said it was like Play-oh, and I realized he was right. Play-Doh Pizza. AND THEN!!! We had pizza the next day as well. It was a solid 6/10, oh and we also had more another day when we brought a teaching friend some food. So like five times in one week. It was a culinary adventure to be sure. I like the shepherds pie pizza and the marinated beef pizza the best. The normal American pizza isn't good here. They make their own stuff better. Holy smokes let's talk about something else.

I am super excited we got someone on date for baptism. There is also a teaching friend that seems to like me more than my companion, so I'm going to be like "I'm leaving which is so sad. I'll never see you again... unless you invite me to your baptism." It simply won't fail. It's mathematically impossible for that to not work. I have the spirit on my side, my rugged good looks, and my charming Korean baby- level speech proficiency. I speak like a toddler, but that's actually pretty good. I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to communicate anything, but I can.  So it's all good in the hood. 

I love seeing how happy the church is making these people that I am teaching. It makes me happy too. Hmokay, I love you guys. Have yourselves a splendid week. 

Truly Truman

PICTURES!

The black and white circles on the brown square is a board game called GO. It is the second oldest board game in the world (with the same rules as those at the time of its creation) To backgammon. Sennet is the Oldest Board game in the world which is an Egyptian board game, but no one knows how it was played. The picture was taken at the end of the game and lots of the stones were taken off the board to help with scoring. It is one of my favorite board games ever! I love two player strategy games. pretty awesome and nerdy huh? I can't choose between GO, chess, and Shogi. then there is also Korean chess 장기. nerdy stuff, but I love it. I gave my companion a 20 point head start, and I haven't counted up the stones yet, but I'm pretty sure I won. The game is played by taking turns placing stones on the board and trying to surround your opponents stones with your own and capturing them. It's so fun. 

There is a picture of two 3D printed Kirby's. They were in a Baptist church that me and elder Titensor went to. It turned into a jolly fun bible bash. I don't know why we went in the first place, besides to say hi to the pastor, but it was still a weird idea. 

There is a picture of me with my new DRIP! For those of you not in the know, drip is a stupid word all the kids are saying these days to mean bling, or fashionable stuff. Anyways. There is me with my new Hello Kitty phone case and a super-duper cheep watch that looks expensive from a distance. There is tons of unauthentic stuff you can buy here. Like supreme T-shirts and Adidas and such. It's all made by some cool third party or something. 

There are some false Idols. Very cool. Really pretty. I would be more respectful of the religious statues, except they put gift shops in all of the Buddhist temples, so they seem to be on the same page as me anyway. 

There is a picture of a sign that prohibits being mean. I love the signs here in Korea. I can never tell how serious the signs are. I think the graphic designers just had a good sense of humor or didn't take themselves too seriously. 

The group picture is of my district. Those studs. 

There aren't many physical keys here. It's all electronic, but these keys are physical as you can see. And if you look closely...they are crazy keys. They just look wild. I wonder how the locks work if there needs to be pins pointing in every direction? Hmmm interesting. 

안녕하세요 me homies? [week 18]

촌아칩니다! Gooood morning or whatever. I'm on the other side of the planet so I can say "good after midnight" and you can't correct me! ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ 

So! What did I do this week you ask? Well thank you for asking! On the day of Tuesday, Elder Titensor and I met with a teaching friend named 아리 (Ali).  She is from Cambodia and she has a different name there. I've heard like three names that people call her, so maybe she is an identity-thieving con artist. Anyways, we had some tea and talked about how we are missionaries and we teach English and about the restoration a little bit. She is super nice! And super short. It was fun talking to her. I didn't understand all of it because one of the three languages she speaks is not English. She speaks fluent Korean and Cambodian and one other language I forgot. She is super nice. Later in the week she took us to a 삼겹살, he most delicious Korean restaurant you can go to. She is so super nice! And kind of weird, but who cares! She is nice and wants be friends and took us to eat expensive, delicious food!

At the end of the day (the literal end of the day, not the stupid colloquialism that people use when they are about to say something profoundly moot and obvious {there is a good bit by Gary Gulman about "at the end of the day". You can probably find it on YouTube}) ANYWAYS 앟마튼, at the end of the day I talked to 이승규 장로님 (Elder sung kyu lee) and I was in an especially chipper mood and he asked, "How is the Korean coming?" And I was like, "Awesome-euh!" (Which is "awesome" in a Korean accent). He was silent for a few seconds and then said, deadpan as can be, "I'm speechless-euh." He is a funny dude. We about my can-do attitude in learning the language. He ended up talking me up in district council the next day, and saying how cool my positive attitude is. I like him! 

On Sunday two teaching friends came to sacrament meeting! Wooooo! This is super hard to get people to do because it's over Zoom. But they came to the church building and we watched sacrament meeting on a TV. Good times. 

Allright! I love you guys, you are all the best. Have a jolly good week. Over and out! 사랑해요  I love you.

Truly, Truman 

PICTURES!!!

I pretend to feel disgusted with myself for sending you memes, but they are fun. I usually send pictures that I take the day I write, because that is Preparation Day. But this P-day is kind of another work day, because I'm trading companions for a day for training purposes or something. The only picture that needs explaining is the bottle. It's a delicious scrum-ba-dilly-umptious tea. Best served warm. Would recommend. 

Year of the tiger!

안녕하세요 여러분 (Hi, Everyone!) [week 17]

Hello everybody. How are you all doing on this fine day? 잘지내신가요? I am doing right well. 잘지내요! OhhhhKay, what did I do this week that is worthy of notation creation? WELL! I'm glad I asked, because the answer to that question is "a lot." 

My companion and I met with Mollie at a Cafe and talked about what its like to be in Korea and religion and such. She went to Williams Baptist academy something or other. She is definitely Christian and I can assume she is Baptist, but she mostly just seems to believe in Christ. 

We also met with our friend 서종봄 (so Joeng boem) we ate udon. It was absolutely delicious! And we talked about cooking and War and video games. All things I don't know much about. He speaks perfectly understandable English which is nice. And he is a returned missionary. 

AND THEN  we met with a Cambodian girl named Alli with an ah instead of an a and a Lee instead of whatever you were thinking. 앟마튼! Which literally translates to ANYWAY. We talked to her about the different cultures she has experienced and teaching her English. She is already trilingual with Cambodian, Korean, and I think Vietnamese. She was super nice! We need to baptize her.

AND THEN  we met a guy named 방춘성. Bahng choon soeng. He bought us some absolutely delicious chicken. The Korean fried chicken is superior to American fried chicken. I'm just as patriotic about our country's fantastic obesity inducing junk food as the next cowboy, so when I say the Koren chicken is better, you know I mean it, and that I will always have a spot saved in my heart for American food to clog up. What was I talking about? 방춘성. 그래서 (pronounced ku ray so, but kinda sounds like Kay so, and It means so. It works out in English too) we talked to this guy about religion for the whole meal and he didn't seem uncomfortable or like he was just forcing himself to be polite at all. He was just a super duper open-minded guy. I like him a lot! We met all three of these people last Saturday. It was the best day of the week. 

Then the next day we taught 윤채린 and her dad 윤석붕. Yoon Chae rean and Yoon soak boong. And 석동진 soak doang Jean, a super nice member was there. We taught English then talked about the book of Mormon. It was very successful. We gave them both a book of Mormon and invited them to read a scripture out of Third Nephi. 

It was great to meet all these great people and share a message about the restored church with them. 10/10 I would recommend going on a mission. 

PICTURES!!!

There's a cat that thinks he is so cool but HE IS NOT!

There's my companion getting stolen on one of those beat outdoor gyms.

There is a picture of me making a heart because I am filled with love

There is a 할머니 harmoni  or "grandmother" pushing her cart and being awesome. When I called home Monday morning, I told my mom that all the harmoni's push around their carts kind of hunched over, wearing big, purple, puffy coats . . . this lady was the first person we saw when we went out that day.  Her coat is pink, but her pants are purple. You get the idea. 

A selfie and a meme... I guess I ran out of ideas.

Thanksgiving at the MTC [week 9]

Hello 안녕하세요! How is everyone doing on this fine day? Sorry this email is a couple days late. 

SO! let me tell you what happened on Tuesday. Michael A Dunn from the 70 came over and gave a super motivating devotional.  He is the guy that told the story about the Olympic bikers in conference. His sports analogy on Tuesday was about cross-country skiing. I forgot the athlete's name, but her cool quote was that her biggest fear "is crossing the finish line with energy to spare."  His devotional was super uplifting and motivating.

Then on Thanksgiving Day, Elder Gary E. Stevenson came and gave a devotional. It was so cool! The big take-away from his talk was to be grateful for four things: the missionary purpose, change of heart, the restoration, and the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost. 

Then we watched a movie called Ephraim's Rescue. I think it would have been a really bad movie, (so very, terribly, really cringy and bad) but I haven't seen a movie in two months . . . so it was the greatest cinematic experience of my life! 

AND THEN, we did a service project with an organization called "fighting hunger" for two hours, led by Sister Sharon Eubank. The MTC bagged over 250,000 brown sugar oatmeal meals. It was a jolly good time. I was on "holding the bag under the funnel" duty. I talked to sister Anna Fenberg and Sister Peterson for two hours. They are the coolest sisters. We talked about spiritual stuff and movies and mission life and such. They said my Disney spirit character is "Dug" from the movie Up or "Crush" from Finding Nemo (that makes me happy😊).

AND THEN, we went to a musical number where the lead fellow from the Piano Guys (Jon Schmidt) came and played some Taylor Swift tunes. Some of the missionaries were absolutely losing their minds when they heard his songs. As for me I will give it a solid thumbs up. It was good. 

Blurry photo of Jon Schmidt himself

AND THEN!!! We were excused to go look at the Christmas lights. We got to stay out until 9:30 instead of 9:15, I am kidding you not. This was my favorite part. I just got to hang out and take pictures and laugh with my new besties from my district and the other Asian districts.  Best day EVER!

Elders Renfroe and Binks

Elders Renfroe and Harden

Elders Fisher, Belt, Dickey, Bailey, and Gallup, and ME

On Sunday, sisters Fenberg, Peterson, Hong, and Elders Binks and Fisher, all played a musical number. I think it was arranged by Elder Binks, but I am not sure. It was easily the best musical number I have seen in the MTC. I'll post it on Facebook. It brought two and a half tears to my eyes. I am going to miss those guys.😭

MORE PICTURES!

The Carpenters Gift is a painting done by my high school art teacher, Andy Berg. It represents God wanting to give us blessings, but we first have to let go of some of the things we hold onto that aren't Christlike.

The selfie is me and elder belt

Elder Renfroe and Elder Zac Belt, called to Nagoya Japan

The group picture is the Japanese district. Elder Asiasiga is the guy in the front doing the bow and arrow pose. He is super cool and chill and spiritual. AND he has a Naruto hoodie, so he is of the highest caliber. 

Elder Lucius Asiasiga in front, going to Japan Tokyo North

The selfie with lots of people is me and Elder Binks, and Campbell, and sisters Johnston, Hong, Peterson, and Rich. I love those guys!

Sisters Johnston, Hong, Peterson, and Rich.  Elders Campbell, Binks, and Renfroe

I Iove you guys! And I love my MTC buddies. I'm going to miss them just as much as I miss all of you! Don't forget to brush your teeth and read The Book of Mormon. 

Truly Truma- pfffff I mean

Elder Renfroe

Top: Me, Elder Fisher, Elder Pestana, Elder Prock, Elder Dickey, Elder Harden
Bottom: Elder Griswold, Elder Binks, Elder Del Priore, Elder Campbell, and Elder Livingston

Griswold, Fenberg, and Peterson

This is what I like to do for exercise--
the basketball gym is too competitive

DO NOT anger the haircut lady [Week Eight]

Hello, everybody! How are you all doing on this fine day? 

I am doing pretty alright. It's been a good week. Made some new friends whose names I cannot recall at this time. And I learned some Korean words, and I got a haircut.  For those of you about to come to the MTC (*cough cough* Caleb), DO NOT anger the haircut lady. She is a scary lady! She got to the salon and started angry-talking us where to sit. Some idiot elder told her that he "was supposed to get a haircut yesterday at 2:30 and you guys weren't there." And she was like, "Yes, we were. We got done early and waited for a half hour till 2:45, and you guys didn't show up!" She was talking smack about that elder (and her husband) when she wasn't yelling at us to rotate seats.

So yeah, don't mess with her or she'll talk some serious smack on you and give you a bad haircut. 

I showed Elder Prock how to play Janggi (Korean chess) this week, and he beat me the first game, (because I was going easy on him) and the second game (because he isn't terrible) and I'm about to beat him in an ongoing game. Fun times. 

I brought the Janngi pieces, but we had
to make a Janngi board out of cardboard

I'm leaving in a weekish. Either next Monday or Tuesday. I don't have my flight plans yet, but I do have my visa. (HUZZAH for visa!) We had an early departure meeting because this coming week is Thanksgiving. And what we learned at that meeting was that we should follow the instructions given on our itinerary.  Really useful info from that hour-long meeting. Just incredible what you can learn in one hour. Actually, it was uplifting and they psyched us up to get into the field, so that was good I guess. 

OH! Brother George Clooney (the choir director. I found out his real name but he will always be George Clooney, Jr. to me) told us if there was one week to show up to choir it would be this coming week, and he dropped some subtle hint-bombs that there would be an apostle or one of the presidency coming next week for Thanksgiving. Exciting!🤪 

PICTURES!

OK I'll tell you their names in the order their faces appear, but I'll tell you in the order as If their faces are Korean characters. So left to right in conglomerates of 2, 3, or 4. Going either 12 / 34 / 1 / 2 / 3 / 12 / 3 / 12...

Just kidding, I'll just tell you their names. The girl that's wearing a blue dress and a green coat in two pictures, and a blue vest in the others, is Sister Rich. She's cool. Southern accent. She's going to Canada ; Japanese speaking.

The fellow with glowing eyes and throwing up gang signs is Elder Belt. He is Native American and Japanese speaking. He has some cool rings. Super cool guy.

The guy standing next to Elder Belt and Sister Rich with the huge smile and yellow tie is Elder Binks. I love this guy! He is super cool and we are going to the same mission. I hope we are companions after we both know the language because he is a nice dude.

Elder Binks, Elder Belt, Sister Rich, Elder Prock in background

Elder Fisher is the guy with the super short tie, glasses, and a dark plaid jacket. He is so chill and funny. We are going to the same mission as well.

The three sisters on the left of the two dark blurry pictures are sister Johnston (top) fenberg (right) and Peterson (left) they are all super nice. They are all going to Korea Seoul. Sister Hong is not in any of these pictures, but she is in this group as well. 

Everyone else in these pictures are irrelevant swine whose names I don't know. (Except for Elder Prock my companion who is in all the pictures)

Sisters Johnston (top) Fenberg (right) and Peterson (left)
Elder Fisher in plaid jacket, 

The picture of the temple is the temple.

The picture of me is ME!