8-26-2013

Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 11:47:42 +0800
Subject: BIQ's, Chinese and a Smoothie
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com

Hello everyone!! Hows life where ever you are? That's good! Now onto me =)

Well this week has been a really interesting one with tons of up's and downs so without further adeu (adue?) however you want to spell it I'll begin

So as tradition states I'll just go right into the food that I ate this week... which really wasn't all that different, but I think one food that I haven't mentioned is a green bean smoothie... I have no idea how to make it but I think I'll make it a goal to find out, but that's one interesting thing about Asia is that they just seem to think that beans are actually a desert food rather than like... a vegetable or something and so if you go to an ice cream place you have the choice to put red beans into your ice cream and they have like this green bean smoothie, which is really good. I think my taste buds are starting to get accustomed to Taiwan food because things are just tasting better every day that I eat them. I have also learned to just accept that I cant read a menu and just kind of pick something and make sure its not intestines, which I'm not sure if I've eaten yet or not, I'll get back to you on that but its cool.

Well outside of food (or in chinese, chule shiwu yiwai... I cant type in characters yet) there is really only one story this week, so I dont know if you know but when you are in the field (and this may only be in Taiwan) they split your mission area into zones and so I have the main zone (which is Huwei city and that area) and secondary areas (which are other towns like dounan, baozhong ect.) which are farther away from your home.  So we were in Dounan which is one of our secondaries teaching an investigator, it was really late (about 9:15 or so) and we were on our way home, going rather quickly because home was a good 15 mins away, when a car door opens right in front of my companion and causes a wreck... yeah, my companion was fine but it turned into kind of a big affair because the guys door got over stretched or something and was closing funky, so the cops got involved and in the end they decided that there wasn't really anything to be done unless the guy wanted to go to court, but he didn't really want to... I felt bad for him but =/.

So one random, I'm not sure if its a culture thing or just because we are foreigners but whenever we ask a person to help us find a house (because sometimes the addresses are really weird like house number 5 in the east side of the city, where the houses aren't really in numerical order) and the people we ask if they dont know get like the whole neighborhood involved, its really cool but I also feel kinda bad because I feel like I'm really troubling them.

Also this week I had a chance (because we had a little bit of an overlap when a lesson ran long) to teach a lesson all by my lonesome, and it didn't go too bad but I still didn't understand him as well as I would have liked.  But I got through the material that I needed to teach, he kinda understood what I was saying and it went better than I expected, so that was fun.

Well that's my life for now, its kinda fun but also a lot of hard work.  The people are cool even the ones who have no interest, the food is great, and the place looks really cool, I would send more pictures but they only really allow you to use the camera on p-day so I take advantage of that when I can.

Elder Heaton