Weekly Email - November 11th

This week was great. Well, I had to say goodbye to all of my friends in Katowice, and I will really miss them, but we will be in contact. But the rest was great. We had some good lessons before I left Katowice with some American girls that are baptists and are here to teach pre-school. They had some really interesting views on life. It was nice to see the different prospective and to have my testimony grow on how important and amazing the Restoration was. So much information had been lost and changed, and now we have it again, I am grateful for that.

Then, on Wednesday, I got on a train to go to Warsaw and pick up my trainee before hitting the streets in the scenic city of Wroclaw. I got in to Warsaw to be greeted by the famous Elder H who was also training. Shortly after, Elder R, Elder K, and Elder S joined the training elders. Then the sisters, W, B, and H. We got to spend an hour or two around town getting food and such before we got to the mission home (a place I haven't been in since I was a new Elder in the mission over a year ago). Then we got a pep-talk/trainer meeting with president. I love President Edgren, he had us start and end all of our meetings with music and luckily we had some musically talented sisters who played the violin and piano for us. Then, the trainees came in. I went with a bit of advice that Elder L gave me. He said not to look around and think about which trainee I want, or which I don't want... Just don't judge them. So I didn't, but the meeting got started right away with our trainees and I was the first Elder to get my trainee. President had me stand up and point out my city on the map, and he called up Elder K to be my companion. Elder K is great. He is an American, but grew up most of his life in Switzerland and Belgium. His dad is a commodities trader there. We got a lot of time to talk and get to know each other on our 8 hour train ride from Warsaw to Wroclaw the next day. He has two older sisters, one younger. His family has now been moved to Utah. He is fresh out of high school like all new Elders. He is the great-grandson of Spencer W. Kimball. He did track in high school and is crazy good at Polish for being a greenie. I mean, he just gets the language structure. The flow will come with time of course, but his grammar and vocab are superb.

We got into Wroclaw and our sisters picked us up from the station and told us we had an appointment in 45 minutes. So there was no time to settle in, we got going straight to the appointment after dropping off our bags. We had a private English lesson with three guys and we had nothing planned so I went with emergency plan X where we sit them down and have them create a personalized language study plan. They seemed to really enjoy it overall.

The next day we had an appointment with our investigator M. He is a cool kid, and he is really searching. O (a member) helped us on that lesson. She is the person Sister Stay was pretending to be in the MTC when we taught our "fake investigators".

I think the best part of the week though was just going to church. We have some amazing members here, it is a very bilingual branch. There are some youth and some primary (the primary kids weren't there yesterday though). They were just great.

The city here is gorgeous, built in a sort of delta of the river Odra or something like that. The architecture is wonderful, and there are some really quirky things, like the gnomes that are all over the city. It is hard to describe, but you should look up krasnale we wroclawiu or just wroclaw gnomes. They are pretty neat. I unfortunately have been too busy to take pictures, but next week I will get some for you all.

I think I am going to really enjoy my time here in Wroclaw and I am looking forward to really getting to work with Elder K.

The Rynek "square" in Wroclaw