Elder Taylor Moulton: Week 18: Chocolate Milk Eruption, Driving Skills, and Spanish Gokarting

Hola familia!!

4 days until we FaceTime!!! So pumped! This week has been a bit
interesting, and also a week of taking risks as I sang my first solo
in front of people(see the video if you're curious), and ate some
insanely spicy Spanish fish. We ate this fish called Meluza at Akim
Bigdadys house, our favorite Nigerian in the ward(his family’s the
bomb). It tasted great, but I kid you not if your breathed in
afterward it was like drinking Starbucks hot chocolate right after
they hand it to you, and then having the feeling stay for an hour. It
burned haha. It was a good experience, and we were able to teach a
good lesson with them after so it all worked out in the end.

Another story with Akim, we were contacting around our area with
him(he's a rockstar at it, he won't let one person go by without
trying to talk to them), when we saw this lady rub the bottom of her
low car on the edge of the concrete. He tried to help her, but when
she only made it worse, he loudly exclaimed "She's a woman, they don't
drive well" as we walked away, all in his heavy Nigerian English
accent. It was super funny, but offensive too, but it's was just
mainly funny to see him speak his mind so openly(then again, most
Nigerians here speak their mind pretty well).

Another fun thing this week was our wards Christmas Talent show and
lunch. The food was interesting to say the least(they gave us a
massive Tupperware filled with all of it so we’re still finding ways
to get rid of it), and the talent show was half filled by us
missionaries. We sang the Mumford and Sons version of come thou
font(search it it's super cool), and each of us had to sung a verse by
ourselves, we were terrified since we had all never done that before,
at least in front of people. But the ward liked it anyways, so either
they're really nice about it, or we actually sounded good(I hope the
second). Then, as elder Turner and Hemeyer sang hallelujah, Elder
Parker, the Hermanas, and I filmed on the stairs on the side of the
chapel. While filming, thus little two year old holding a chocolate
milk bottle squeezed it as hard as he could, spraying Elder Parker and
I all over our white shirts. The funniest part was trying not to make
a scene because the little kid started crying after doing that, the
other elders were still singing, and I was struggling to hold on to
the iPad that was filming them, all on now wet stairs. Overall a messy
but funny story from a successful ward activity(Jeannine our recent
convert was in charge of it, and she did an amazing job!).

As I mentioned last week, to bring the Christmas spirit to more
people, the six missionaries in our ward decided to go out caroling
in each of our three areas before Christmas, and last night we went
into Hermana Storer and Craguns area. We brought along one of the
American couples in the ward who are going to the Berkeley music
school here, but I don't think they expected the cultural experience
of going to Vicente, the old Spanish man from two weeks ago's
apartment. We had to dodge strange dance parties, and some flirtatious
Spaniards who we ended up singing jingle bells to anyways, but that
was all made up with how happy Vicente was to have visitors.

For preparation day today we went gokarting as a district near the
city of sciences, which was a blast! They were off-roading ones so we
flew past runners and over dirt mounds in the park as we played tag
with the karts, it was awesome, and it only costed 5 euros to rent
them! Definitely one of my favorite preparation days so far!

Overall, I’m excited for Christmas, and to get into this new week,
which is filled with meals with a bunch of people for the holidays,
and Christmas proselyting activities which I'll talk about next week!

Love and miss you all!

Elder Taylor Moulton