06.17.13



My hood.



Bowl of duck feet.

Elder Bayer eating a duck foot.

Duck foot.

My homemade NED spear.

So, here's the deal, there were no wild animals attacking missionaries, but that's probably mostly because there aren't many wild animals around here. That would be cool though. At least I didn't write the subject line as, I GOT STABBED this time. HA! 

Here's the low-down on the week. 

One of my friends, Elder Liam Musgrove, finished his mission last transfer and has been back in Manchester. He showed up to City Centre here and gave us a call last p-day to come see him. It was pretty dang weird seeing someone who I only knew as a missionary in their real life setting. He was a lot different, not in a bad way though. Ha, it was pretty funny. He has a beard already and changed up his hairstyle and everything. 

I went on an interesting exchange last week to say the least. I went with a missionary named Elder Bayer. He is from America, but got called to the Scotland/Ireland Mandarin speaking mission, so he only works with Chinese people in the Chinatown area. I was with him all day and it was way cool listening to them speak in chinese. I just sat there and acted casual most of the time. Pretty easy life. ha! The day before I went there, he told me that they had a dinner appointment scheduled. This would usually be an exciting prospect for me, but he then told me that the appointment was with some Chinese people who lived on the coast in China and that they would be cooking all types of seafood. This really really freaked me out. So I spent the next 24 hours complaining and worrying about eating seafood. It wasn't as bad as I thought though. 

We got there and they had a bunch of different dishes for us to try from. One of them just so happened to be a bowl of massive duck feet. So, I proceeded to eat a duck foot. I have such a hatred for fish, that I would rather try a duck foot than eat fish. Anyway, they were all using chopsticks, but they could see that I looked like an idiot trying to use them, so they gave me a fork and laughed at me. It was pretty funny. Then they taught me how to eat a duck foot. You can kind of see where the joints are, so you pick the first one and bite it, (There are about 4 joints in each toe) then you have part of the toe in your mouth and you just suck off the skin/webbing. It's a pretty weird texture and it's kind of strange to realize that there is a duck's foot in your mouth, but it honestly didn't taste too terrible. I finished the whole foot, but on one of the big joints, I couldn't bite it right, so I just bit straight through the bone instead and everybody looked at me weird. And when you've sucked off the skin/webbing, then you just spit the bone out on the table. Because that's how they roll in China. You just throw/spit whatever you don't want onto the table. I also ate some spice beef stuff with a bunch of tofu. It was the first time I've had tofu and it wasn't bad. 

I've been able to visit some old friends of mine from Springboig 1 and it's been really fun. I went on an exchange to my old area and I slept in my old bed and everything. It was pretty weird. I don't know if I liked it... haha. 

My time is running out, but I love you all. Things are going great here. Natasha is still golden. She came to church again and told everyone that she wants to be baptized. We should be seeing her again this week so I will keep you posted. Prayer works. Listen to the Spirit. Do Missionary work. And CONGRATULATIONS TO THE ALLEN FAMILY!!!!

Elder Goodwin