October 29-November 4, 2012

This a picture from our Mongolian trip of a ger (pronounced gear). There are ger communities on the outlying areas of Ulaabaatar. This is where the nomadic people live. In 2007-08 there was a very hard winter and many of the animals died. The people moved from the countryside closer to the city to take low paying jobs. There are no amenities in the ger. An interesting note about Mongolia is that they heat water in large coal fired plants and pipe the water above ground to each of the buildings to supply heat and hot water.

 Shopping day at Stanley Market, a tourist shopping area where you can find good buys and you can bargain some. If you look at the island of Hong Kong, Stanley is the southern tip.

View from the window of the restaurant where we had lunch at the Pickled Pelican. We had English style fish and chips. 

Another view from the restaurant.












We purchased candy in Mongolia that was probably from Russia. It was all chocolate and very good. Garnalee bought Halloween bags and made a bag for each of the Senior Missionaries as a treat.

Following the re-emphasis by the First Presidency of supplying our own family names for the temple, we viewed a new Power Point presentation that was prepared by the Family History Department in Salt Lake City to go along with the First Presidency letter that was read in Sacrament meetings. The presentation is for leaders to help them teach the members.

Thursday was our monthly temple session and testimony meeting with the Area Presidency. It is a great blessing to be instructed by the Area Presidency.

We attended the ballet on Friday evening. We had the best Chinese food ever. It was at a restaurant called Din Tai Fung. It was a very different experience. The highlight of the performance was a spoof on ballet.  Tom decided he would stick with the Nutcracker.

 We had agreed to give a Family History mini class to one of the branches. We showed them a fan chart that is created from the information in New Family Search that will show each of our families for nine generations. Garnalee's family has very few open spots but Tom's family has a lot so we know where we need to work. The sisters were very excited to see it and to do one for their family.  We  also discussed doing a Book of Remembrance and a 4 generation pedigree chart. We learned that only 2.5% of the membership of the church has their four generations in New Family Search.