Week Twenty-eight

FAMILY!

Hello fambam. I sent a couple other emails that have pictures of Hannover, and some from Hof! Cool stuff, I hope you enjoy the pictures I send. I like sending them home, so you know what Germany is like and all that stuff. AND I found the memory card reader thing at a super market here for only 3€ so I bought it! Super cheap and it makes sending pics a million times easier. So you guys don't have to worry about trying to get me one. Good stuff.

It sounds like the house is super quiet and lonely haha. Especially since Thomas is going to be leaving for EFY. What are you guys going to do? Probably just be really really bored. But then again, it will probably be nice having nobody in the house. Nice and quiet.

I'm sitting in the Taj Mahal Indian restaurant/internet cafe right now. There's a guy next to me using skype, skyping somebody probably in Turkey or some other Muslim country and he is full on shrieking. Like yelling at the top of his lungs in some crazy language. It's only a little annoying.

Anyway, our past week was better! We did more work, saw more success. Simple math equation. I keep having to explain that if we want investigators or to see any success at all, we're going to have to actually go outside and work. It's slowly sinking in. The work in Hof will go on!

Montag: Last Monday, we spent our P-Day with the Elders from Plauen (the next closest area). We went to the Untreusee (big lake thing) and played mini golf there. I almost won. I lost by 2 strokes because of the stupid last hole. It was almost a reenactment of Happy Gilmore with the clown. Tragic, but I got over it. After P-day, we went back to the apartment and made some important calls. That was basically Monday.

The screaming Arabic guy just left. Bonus.

Dienstag: Tuesday was kind of boring/slow/weird. The morning went alright. The only lesson we taught was to some guy in a car who stopped us and asked us if we wear 'unterhosen aus gummi' (rubber underwear). We were very confused and quickly turned the conversation to the Book of Mormon and taught him a little about it. Solid. He then drove away. For lunch, I made mom's spaghetti carbonara!  Elder Huber was really excited to eat it. He actually liked it a lot. The rest of the day was spent walking miles going by on contacts/important people we need to get in contact with, but everyone was sick, or had visitors or some nonsense.

Mittwoch: Wednesday morning we had district meeting. The 1:30 hour bus ride to Plauen is always fun. But district meeting was cool. I like the missionaries in our district. We got home kind of late, around 1 and ate the classic Germany Berlin missionary meal: rice, tuna fish, and curry ketchup. It's probably the cheapest thing a missionary could eat in Germany. And it doesn't taste bad, but it certainly isn't gourmet. Oh well. It made me not hungry. Mission accomplished. We meet with Schwester E after lunch. She is cool, I like her. She speaks Bayrish though (the dialect out of super southern Germany) and it's a little hard to understand her sometimes. She has these two crazy dogs that live in her apartment with her. I think they're insane. Like really. But she's a super sweet lady. That was Wednesday.

Donnerstag: Thursday morning we registered ourselves in the city of Hof. We need to do that whenever we switch cities. Elder Huber had never done it either, so we went and took care of that. The German lady tried to spell 'San Diego' like ' San Jyeko' hahahah even though I spelled it out for her. Oh well. We then ate. Bratwursts and fried potatoes. (Deep fried, with our magical DDR deep fryer) The deep fryer is amazing. It's horrible for my health, but we've been deep frying everything haha (deep fried Oreos, deep fried Snickers, deep fried Lion bar-german chocolate bar, and deep fried cinnamon sugar balls-Elder Pollard's home made recipe). GO FRIED OR GO HOME. After lunch we visited with Bruder L for basically the rest of the day. He's a less active who likes to drink. He knows that it's wrong but he can't stop, so were meeting with him a lot to help him out. He's a way cool guy. We watched 'The Testaments' and 'Legacy' with him. Good stuff.

Fritag: Friday was hectic! And ridiculously hot. It's super warm here by the way. After study, we went by on a contact who lived super far away and we walked for like an hour in the super hot sun. I was sweating so much. We got there, and he said he didn't have time....oh well. We then walked home. We ate tortellini and sauce. Then we had weekly planning. It was nice to be inside for a while, because it was so freaking hot. After weekly planning, we met this guy named E Z. He was in the area book as an old investigator, so we called him up to see if he wanted to meet. Our meeting was intense. Basically him telling us what he believes on. And how he interprets the Bible. 'Scriptures mingled with the teachings of man' basically. He then healed a homeless guy.......yea. Some bum walked up and started listening and then asked this guy for a blessing. Very dramatic. He was a nice guy though and maybe we'll meet again.

Samstag: We spent the whole day at the M's house. We did service from like 10 to 5 and then went to this weird school fest thing with music and stuff. I don't know. It was weird and we probably could have been doing actual missionary work. But we stayed...I would have loved to go do some doors or something. But we stayed...

Sonntag: Sunday. I made delicious banana pancakes on Sunday morning. Complete with homemade wildberry syrup. Church was at 10. Which President M. gave a really good talk and lesson. That was cool. (It just started pouring rain. Weird) Shwester E also brought a friend to church! That was cool. And he friend was really interested and we're meeting her again on Thursday! Good stuff. Also, my euro pants ripped at the end of church. A little embarrassing, but nobody knew. I sewed them up this morning. After church...we spent the whole day at the M's house again. We ate 3 different times from noon till 9. I also learned how to play Adele on the piano. And I learned how to play this game called Ligretto. Good stuff.

The week was cool. An improvement from last week, but still a work in progress.

Hof is way cool. I think I said this last week, but if there were two super diligent missionaries here who just worked 24/7 and worked their butts off, this place would explode. I'm looking forward to that.

Everything is going good with Elder Pollard!

MAM - thanks for the recipes. Last week I asked for some recipes that I could use the deep fryer with. That would be cool.

Also...here's a new subject/obsession. Lederhosen. I told myself that I would never buy lederhosen because they're so expensive. But I've grown to love them! haha seriously. They're super cool and I just happen to be in the only area in this mission where you can buy them. They're like 100€ though. Pricey. Just a thought parentals. Christmas is coming up.

Anyway, I love the emails still! I love you all. I love being a missionary!

Elder Pollard