9-16-2013

Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 12:16:09 +0800
Subject: Xili Hui, baking cookies, and Taiwan...
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello Family, Dajia hao

So this week has been one full of eventful things, fun stuff and cookies! so lets get started.

This week on the food market, I didn't really eat anything really interesting, but I guess the one thing that I did eat was a drink called duoduo.  Its a kinda yogurt flavored drink that is quite delicious, but whats better than a plain duoduo is actually mixing it with other random stuff, so me and my companion bought a 1 liter bottle of it, and we got a big 2-3, i'm not actually sure, liter bottle of sprite and we mixed it, it was pretty good but we have been experimenting with that, we also tried it with just plain water, and dongguo tea (or winter melon tea) which were all pretty good. beyond that though there wasn't really much to talk about.

So the biggest thing that happened this week would have to have been that I had a baptism, which happened this last Saturday and it was really cool.  While we were talking to her about who she wanted to do what, we asked her who she wanted to give the talks at the event and she picked two people that helped with her lessons (we call them peike's) and we originally thought that she was going to pick the member that helped out with most of the lessons we taught her, but she actually picked him for the talk and thought that it would be kinda weird if he did two things and so she actually picked me to perform the baptism!!! So weird but it was a really cool and interesting experience.  I'm really glad that I was able to participate in that and hearing her testimony about it afterwards was really cool.  And as a really cool way to kinda finish her baptism, right after the event they had a... I think it was a relief society meeting but everyone just attended, but they watched "The Other Side of Heaven" which was just a really cool way to end the night even though I wasn't able to stay to watch the whole thing.

So beyond that, as this was the last week of this transfer, our English class had a party, and for that party we did two things, the first was a talent show and the other we baked cookies!! now the reason that that is so cool here is that nobody here actually owns an oven, and a lot of people actually have never seen one before, so nobody bakes anything which means that the whole baking cookies things was a totally new experience for just about everybody who attended.  it was lots of fun and we actually had a some luck in finding all the ingredient's that we needed, but in the end I think we bought the wrong kind of brown sugar which made the dough look like a chocolate dough, but all in all it was really good and all the people really seemed to enjoy it, and the talent show afterwards was awesome, except for our part because we didn't really prepare a talent.

Also this week during contacting just last night we ran into a group of college students ( Huwei is actually like a college town, which is really weird and makes a lot of our LA's that we have here impossible to find because they just lived in student housing but have moved out now ) who were all from Vietnam, they were really cool invited us in and took some pictures with us ( cause we are white ) and just talked with them for a bit, but it was a little interesting because their first language is Vietnamese and I think the one who had been there the longest had only lived there for only 2 years or so, so they couldn't read Chinese, and definitely didn't speak any English, but they were really nice and gave us a box of moon cakes after all was said and done, and were going to meet up with some time to play soccer so what was cool.

Well thats all that has really happened this week, I have enjoyed it, time is kinda flying by, my first transfer has just ended and one of the cool guys in my district is going to my companions first area.  This also means that my training is slowly coming to an end and one of the privilages of being trained is that you get an hour for dinner for language study for your first transfer, that is now over.  But I know that things are going great. the people are awesome, the sights are amazing, and the temperature is cooling down so thats where I am now woo!

Elder Heaton

PS I finally got a full Chinese name, it was kinda weird for me because a couple of times people asked me whats my name and I had to tell them that I only had a last name, so I asked a member to give me a name, and it is...

He Liang Xing

Liang - shining

Xing - star

He - doesn't really have any meaning

so yeah

From

He Liang Xing