“Finding” @ Costco

Fun week this last week! Monday, we had some of my friends (the ward mission leader from my previous district and his friend, Karen) drive his car over to pick us up and take us to Costco! It’s really convenient to actually have my own Costco card since we can just ask anyone we know who has a car to take us.

Rotini Alfredo with the house salad

My companion, Elder Puzey, and I want to save money by making all of our own meals instead of just buying food on the street for pretty much every dinner and about half of our lunches, so we bought tons of food at Costco! It actually ended up being really well priced. We’ve been making food inside for about a week now.

Sliders and green beans

Beef stroganoff

Ice cream makes everyone smile!

During English class this week, we made ice cream in bags! My companion and I taught cooking vocabulary to the intermediate and advanced classes, and then taught them a really simple way to make ice cream. We prepared all the bags and ingredients in advance, and brought them so all our students could make their own ice cream. It was super fun and the ice cream was great!

Between “sets” at Shipai Night Market with Carol

Saturday evening, my companion and I tried out something new for contacting people. We went into a local marketplace, borrowed some stools from a business, stood on top of them, and sang songs in Chinese and English. Shipai night market (石牌夜市) is basically a street that’s full of people and vendors at night.

My companion also played the guitar during that time as well. It was so fun! We’d have people stop and take pictures or videos of us – we had this one group of girls from a local nursing college video us for a long time and then talk with us for a while. Turns out they’re actually from mainland China and they’ll be going back in a couple weeks! We’ve got a couple things we’ll probably change next time we do this, but we’ll definitely do it again this week! (Video credit to Carol…thanks for providing the “evidence”!)

Hellen…rockin’ her new hair cut

Yesterday was the monthly new member/investigator fireside for the Taipei zones. They’re always spiritually uplifting…and I get to be reunited with old friends! (More photo credits to Hellen Tsai)

I’m sorry, Elder Anderton…we’ve already selected the winner. #RealLifeEmoticon

Look beyond what you see…

Also, here’s a nice video of what happened last night when we came home. Without spoiling all the details before you watch it, we came home to a huge cockroach flying around inside our apartment. We probably ended up using about half of our can of roach killer on it…

Sometimes combat is an essential part of service…and someone screamed like a little girl!

– Elder Austin Simonson
文長老