Cabane à Sucre

Hey all,

This week the French YSA sisters are using the computers in the mission office, so we're stuck with our phones to email today. This email might be shorter than normal. Sorry. 

Last Tuesday, Elder Furness and I went and visited Zhang Ning so he could work some Chinese medicine on us. He ended up just giving me a really intense massage and cracking more joints in my back than I knew I had. It was pretty fun, and made my back feel really good. Afterwards we had a lesson with him and he accepted a date for baptism. Hopefully everything will continue to go well to keep him on that date. 

On Friday Alice said she wanted to take us out to dinner, so we went to a really well-known noodle bar in Chinatown. They were probably the best noodles I've ever had. Elder Furness and I both ate way too much, but we had a good time. Alice said she wanted to go contacting with us afterwards, but we didn't really have enough time to do any real contacting. 

On Saturday, the branch had it's annual cabane à sucre activity, so we all drove out to rural Québec about an hour south of the island (which is still in my area bounadries. I could go all the way down to the New York border if I really wanted to) to eat a bunch of food covered in maple syrup. It's a super Québecois activity which originally started just to celebrate having so much maple syrup, I guess. They brought out as much eggs, sausage, ham, and roubabou as we could eat, and then gave us a bunch of donuts to finish it off. Really unhealthy, but really sweet. After the meal, we poured fresh hot maple syrup on snow, waited until it froze, and then ate it on a stick. You can't get more Canadian. 

Yesterday, one of our somewhat recent converts, Catalina, asked us to come to court with her to help her translate. She was trying to file a restraining order against her ex-boyfriend for a lot of complicated reasons. We ended up spending about 4 hours with her in the Montreal courthouse, not actually having to do anything in an actual court (which I was very happy about),  and not actually having to translate anything. At least she really appreciated having our support in everything, and we at least got to know her better. An interesting experience all-in-all. 

That's it for me this week. 

Elder Hadden

Pictures:

1. This is the maple forest where the cabane à sucre was. There were lots of maple trees.

2. Selfies with Cedric. He never holds still so it's really hard to get pictures of him.

3. The maple syrup refinery or distiller or whatever you want to call it

4. Eating frozen syrup on a stick.

5. Noodles! So many noodles.

6. A set of information cards one of West's investigators made for me to help me learn Chinese Geography.

Translations

Cabane à sucre - sugar shack, where maple sap is refined into maple syrup

roubabou - traditional Voyageur split pea soup.

Voyageur - a French Canadian boatman employed by the fur companies in transporting goods and passengers to and from trading posts in the 18th and 19th centuries.They traveled in long canoes, sang to keep everybody's paddle strokes in sync, and generally could not swim.  They slept in the open, or with their head and torso under their overturned canoes

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