Week Sixty-nine

HELLO

Emailing the world from Hamburg, Germany. It's a good place to be right now if you like grey skies and drizzle. It's been kind of bad weather for the past couple of days. But bad weather doesn't come into account when you're planning for the day. You just go and do....which is good. Annoying some times when it rains because come on....who wants to stop and talk when it's just pouring? The PREPARED people, that's who! Still doesn't make walking around in the rain fun...but oh well we do it anyway. I'm still super pumped from the Mother's Day call, too! It was really great and basically a small miracle that we got it to work at all haha. I apologize again for not telling you any information about when and how we were going to skype.....just slipped my mind haha. I feel very bad. But thank goodness everything worked out. It was the best Mothers Day gift for me too haha.

I've been riding the excitement wave of skyping this whole past week haha. This past week was just CRAZY! I'm telling you haha. It was super hectic and surprising. We had to travel a lot, too. Let me tell you about it.

Dienstag: (We did P-Day last Tuesday instead of Monday) P-Day was good. Elder Lykins and I were in Hamburg for a while and we had a district P-Day in Schwerin after. We got permission to all go and visit the castle in Schwerin, which was pretty cool. It was kind of boring on the inside haha, just like a small selection of art....wooooo. It was nice and cool but it was just because we could be with the district and all hang out. We ate lunch together and then came home. Not much else!

The castle at Schwerin

Mittwoch: Wednesday was day one of madness. Someone from the office called and wanted to come check out the mold in the apartment....there's a lot of mold in Germany. But he said that he was going to need like a lot of our help. I was thinking like why on earth would he need our help to check out mold? Well he basically walked in and started pointing out old furniture that was going to be thrown out. He said we were also going to paint the whole apartment and have to help build new furniture! Which is really a blessing. But when you have to do it all...it's pretty tiring. And we only had two days to finish everything. Well we started by like cleaning up a little and throwing a lot of old things away. We had to pull all the furniture away from the walls because someone was going to paint. It was kind of hectic. We had to leave in the middle of everything to go to a service project, but that fell through, so we went right back home to continue helping. That night we had an eating appointment with Bruder Z, our GML. It was way cool. They made like like different wraps and stuff. Just good. We were able to talk about some cool mission stories too. Bruder Z was in Manchester, England and Sister Z was in Temple Square. It was just way cool to hear the stories. Good stuff. We also had Gemiko.

Donnerstag: Thursday was more craziness. This time they brought a bunch of new furniture that had to be set up. We were able to get a bunk bed and 1 1/2 dressers set up before we had to go and eat lunch with Schwester B. She is so nice! I met her for the first time and we went to a Chinese buffet for lunch. It was pretty good. Chinese buffet in Germany is all the same.....average food for a great price. It's just a missionary favorite haha and there's so many of them. After that appointment, we met with Bruder D. We taught about how to stay happy in life. It was a good appointment and he gave us some cola which was very much appreciated because it got hot that day. We were busting out the short sleeve white shorts! After that appointment, we took a break and ate ice cream. It was good. Then me had an appointment with H A and Bruder M. H is a member that we're working with. He's super friendly and loves giving us food. Which is cool because he's a great cook. We ate rice and like lamb celery stew stuff. It was Persian food. So good. After that, we went home.

Freitag: Friday was kind of frustrating because we just didn't work a lot. We had planned two appointments, but one just didn't work and we couldn't get a joint teach for the other. That's just annoying. We should have planned better. But we didn't. We had weekly planning though, which was good.

Samstag: Saturday was fun. We played soccer in the morning, which was super fun as usual. I'm getting good. Watch out Wayne Rooney. We had an appointment fall out, which wasn't cool. But we had a good appointment with Dr. M that afternoon. His neighbor was also there and had some things to say. He's Albanian actually and said he would come to church haha so great. We missed out train out of Bargteheide though, so we had to wait a little more. And then another service project fell out. Not cool.

Sonntag: Sunday was church, which is always good. It was Pfingstsonntag, which is this big weekend holiday in Germany. Beats me why it's a holiday haha something to do with the Holy Ghost. Germany has a lot of religious holidays but not a lot of people know why. They just know that it's a day off haha. We did a lot of contacting the evening and were asking people if they knew why that day was a holiday. No idea usually. It was a good day though. We did a lot of work.

Montag: Monday was the highlight of the week. We got to play soccer again! Spontaneous ward soccer because it was a holiday. And there were people there the we as missionaries actually work with. So good stuff. We came home and studied and ate lunch. Elder Lykins was feeling sick so that was rough. The evening we contacted for like 2 hours. Walking around in the rain haha. It was great though. We made out an appointment with a past investigator and got the contact information for a referral for the Elders in Hamburg. That night we contacted and had an appointment with a referral. Herr V! It was a good appointment. He is very open and like wanted to learn. He said he'd be baptized if he can get an answer that everything is true. That is music to a missionaries ears. He has a small family too. So we were stoked.

And that was the week. It was actually pretty long and hard at times, but it was capped off with a great lesson and we got to meet an awesome guy. We also experienced cooking a lot of friend rice this last week. Getting fancy with our recipes haha. It was actually something that Christian and I cooked a lot at BYU. It's good food. I could sum up the week by saying: soccer, new furniture, contacting, and Herr V.

I've been doing this kind of intense study of the Book of Mormon from the beginning again. That's so much fun haha. It's just great to read and feel the spirit and testimonies of Lehi and Nephi always working together to improve the situation. I admire that! Whatever the situation was, they were both capable of saying yeah it's rough, but we know that what we're doing is true. I haven't gotten to the broken bow part where Lehi get's a little down yet though haha.

My adress is

Elder Tim Pollard
Kirche Jesu Christi

Hermann-Löns-Strasse 48

Ahrensburg 22926

Germany

I love you all so much! I miss you every day! I hope me serving this mission is having a positive affect on my family.