My parents picked us up from the airport in Penang late Saturday night. What a blessing for us to be able to visit mom and dad on their mission! Our favorite highlights: a day on monkey beach, wet market (eating banana pancakes), visiting temples, shopping, watching the Disney movie "Frozen" at the mall, swimming, visiting the botanical garden, Christmas Eve community choir concert, mom's traditional Christmas morning breakfast, an English Christmas lunch at the Suffolk house, caroling Christmas Eve at the senior citizen center, tram up to Penang Hill, Auntie Anne's pretzels and lemonade twice...
They live on the 12th floor of a nice, gated, apartment compound. The elevator doesn't say 12, it says P for penthouse. The compound has a swimming pool, ping pong table, basketball court and outdoor restaurant (where John and I ate our last night there). They have two floors. Three bedrooms up and one down, four bathrooms. It was fun to see where they study. You can hear the Muslims praying (singing) at 6am. Dad says he wakes up to it. The house has ceiling fans in every room and individual AC units. It is a very comfortable apartment. They bought extra sheets, towels, pillows and dishes before we arrived.
Mom is trying to get used to the appliances. She cooked a ham in the crock pot and the entire bottom of the crock pot broke out. The clothes dryer takes over 1.5 hours and they don't have a dishwasher. No hot water in the kitchen. Dad's job is to fill up two large buckets of hot water from the bathrooms and bring them to the kitchen when it is time to do dishes.
The driving is hard. Not only do they drive on the left side of the road but there are lots of one way streets and the traffic is horrible, difficult merging and hard to read signs. Dad drives during the day, mom drives when it is dark. The person not driving sits in the front with mom's phone GPS and navigates. I think it is the most stressful part of their mission.
They meet in a nice church bldg. The RS room in a separate building has a small kitchen that mom cleaned out and organized when she first arrived. The Sunday we were there mom and dad spoke in sacrament meeting. They gave great talks! Dad only had 7 minutes to speak since the "youth" speaker was actually the branch president and he spoke for 20 minutes. We had planned for dad to give us the rest of his talk for FHE, but didn't have time. I was impressed when Mom said she had memorized Luke 2 at age 10.
The branch loves and respects mom and dad! Every person greeted, hugged or talked to them during church. Mom and dad participate in gospel principles class. They work closely with the RS and EQ. They host FHE. They have district meeting in their home every Tuesday. They do member visits with the branch mission leader almost every night. They accompany the elders on visits. On their P-Day they take the elders grocery shopping and let them use their computer and Internet. The elders love mom and dad. They wrote them a very sweet Christmas card and you can see what a blessing it is to young missionaries to have senior couples!
One afternoon I went with them to pay the Internet bill and get a new password. The process took oven an hour. Also they can't pay their phone bill online since they don't have a local credit card. Errands like these are hard in another country. Living in another country is not easy. They seem to have adjusted well to the new foods, sights and smells. They will certainly bless the members and investigators in this area!
Penang national park - trip to Monkey beach
