"El Dia del Grito"

Dear All,

Pretty normal week. It started off with a fun district meeting on Tuesday. Fun fact that I feel like I already mentioned but I don't feel like checking is that we as Americans have been tricked our whole lives. Mexican independence day is NOT in fact 5 de Mayo. It is, in fact, the 15-16 of September. The 15th is called "El Dia del Grito" because at one point in history someone shouted and it was meaningful so now every year the president of Mexico goes out onto a certain balcony and yells stuff like "VIVA MEXICO!" and other inspiring things. How fun. But anyway that day we also had a district meeting, and I didn't feel like doing an official "grito" inside the church would be an appropriate activity, so I brought a bag of tree peppers. If you don't know what those are, the make Jalapenos look like child's play. And so we had a competition. Who could eat more peppers without drinking anything. I took a video cause it was hilarious. But it's way to big to send so that'll have to wait for a year.

So right after the district meeting we went to go eat with a member. And guess what. OCTOPUS SOUP ROUND 2!!!!!!!! Except this time, better! This time, it featured (fijense bien, eh) OCTOPUS, MANTA RAY (which is actually super good), SQUID, and the best part *drumroll* SEA SNAIL!!!! It wasn't that bad at first, I recognized the octopus and the manta ray cause I've eaten it before and I just thought the chunks of squid and snail were just weirdly shaped chunks of normal fish. So I dumped a bunch of hot sauce into the soup and squeezed about 5 lemons into it, and then my companion decides to ask, "and what's the soup made of?" At this point I had no idea how to say "snail" in spanish, so when she said it, I had no idea what it was. When the sister left the room I leaned to my companion and whispered, "what does [caracol] mean?" and he starts thinking and says, "you know Gary, from Spongebob? Yeah you're eating that." WHAAAT UGHHHH EW PUKE. I almost didn't finish the bowl. And when she asked if I wanted more I faked a stomachache. I'm such a bad person but seriously. Who does that to a person. Feed them snail. We are gonna eat with her again tomorrow, pray for me please.

And then that night was the Noche Mexicana in the ward. I was so pumped. This is the only Mexican Independence day that I get to experience in the mission. And guess what. The call came at 5:00 that we had to be home by 6:00 for security. NOOOOO.

Another cool thing this week. We started passing out the official invitations for the temple open house. They gave us as a companionship 600 invitations. We set the goal to give all of them away in two weeks. Game on.

Other than that, nothing super exciting happened this week. It rained a little bit, and yeah.

Well BYU put up a fight, hopefully this doesn't drop em too far down. They'll pick it up again I'm sure of it. Now let's go take the Big House by storm woo!

Los quiero mucho,

Elder Rawlings