Duck eggs and Giant Buddha

9/8/13
Ni Hao everyone! 

Pinocchio (member friend in DouLiu) just started filling out his paperwork to go on a mission!  Super cool.

I played "spot it" (both versions) with my English class on Wednesday and it was a hit. Everyone in my class (14-35 years old) liked it and got really into it. Great idea!

The moon festival is about to start and that means lots of Barbecues! The church is having one on Saturday that we're going to and apparently missionaries get invited to BBQs by strangers a lot. Pomelos are a festival, seasonal fruit (which DouLiu is famous for!) that I tried for the first time this week. They're big, green and soft, but the inside looks like an orange. Unfortunately they are the most Fan (annoying, bothersome, irritating) fruit ever! The skin is super thick and leaves green oil on your hands and the sections of fruit have tough, strong skin between each one. It takes 20 minutes to eat a small one! plus the fruit is bland and leaves a bitter taste for a long time. Basically pomelos are lame. That is all.

I also ate the duck fetus this week. I was on an exchange with a zone leader in DouLiu and we both decided to eat it. It cost about 60 cents USD. The yolk was basically normal, the fetus was small, soft and slightly furry and the white was SUPER hard and chewy. they white was the hardest part to eat. It crumbled instead of dissolved in your mouth, so you basically had to swallow  whole. Everyone should try it some day. Also, everyone try the century eggs. I eat them often. 

In other news, McDonalds has been in Taiwan for 30 years. We ate lunch there and my companion ate corn soup; on the way out he sniffed and then started laughing and said "I had a corn in my nose!" and opened his mouth to show me. I don't know how he managed to get "a corn" in his nose from drinking soup, but he ate it... :P

 We've spent about 8 hours in total trying to find ONE less active member's house in a far away place and we managed to find a hidden Buddhist sanctuary place with the giant gold Buddha in it.  We also went to the police station to ask about the address to find out it doesn't exist. GAH!

Z DX (the investigator with a baptismal date a few weeks ago) just called and asked when he can have a baptismal interview. That's pretty strange. We'll see on Wednesday why he's changed all of a sudden. I have hope! :)  (Baptism date was dropped a couple of weeks prior to this)

We're working to get the branch more involved in retaining the people we have. Baptizing does no good if they just leave again. Missionaries move and we can only do so much in a short time. We're starting up home teaching with the branch now. We'll see how it goes. We probably haven't baptized in DouLiu because we needed to rescue and help the branch retain. The Lord knows that. We've got some good people lined up with baptism potential. We'll see how it goes.

 

The work was focused on visiting LAs (less actives) again this week. Yesterday we went to two secondary areas and rode 68 minutes at an average speed of 16 mph to get home. Kinda crazy. I got to cut a watermelon at someone's house and they were all watching very intently as I did it. They all think I'm a master chef because I peeled and cut up a watermelon with the SAME KNIFE and do it in less than 2 minutes. :) Kinda fun 

That's about it for this week. Love you all!

Elder Wolf