Friday, August 2, 2013

Passau: August 2, 2013

Dearest Fam-bam,

Sorry that I had to change my Pday this week, but things have been kind of crazy. The Müllers have been working on moving still, and we told them we would come on Monday to help. They have a ridiculous amount of stuff, and a huge house, and so Monday turned into coming Wednesday and coming Thursday as well, which is why today, Friday, I will finally be writing you.

Things with the companion are still going well. We get along really well, which has been good. I have really been enjoying it here in Passau recently, and being with Elder Barker has also been fun. He laughs at all of my ridiculous jokes, or at all the things that aren't really funny. That has been nice, that can be a pick-me-up when things aren't going well. He has been a lot more open with me recently, and I don't know. It is hard to get annoyed with him, and he never gets annoyed with me, so life is pretty good.

District Meeting went pretty well, at least a lot less stress than I used to have. The last time I was District Leader I was super stressed about everything and it made it not a ton of fun. Now though I am able to plan the meetings and carry them through with a minimal level of stress, which I have been really enjoying, because I am not normally that stressed of a person, and I don't like it when I am stressed.

My talk also went really well this week. I chose a topic that I have studied and thought about a ton on my mission, which is happiness. I used President Utchdorf's talk, and shared a lot of my own experiences and opinions, and I was able to talk a good 20-25 minutes about it. Afterwards a ton of the members complimented me on it. I was really grateful that I was able to talk about it, because I have learned so much about this on my mission, and I was super happy to be able to share those thoughts and experiences with other people. 

As for missionary work in terms of teaching or finding, things have been going very slowly recently. Last week we had very few opportunities to do finding, because of a trip to Munich, and two or three days spent working at the Müllers, and so far this week has been very similar. This is annoying in some ways, because although I am not the biggest of fan of doing straight up finding, I know that the less we do that, the more we will have to do later. These last couple of weeks have not been great for teaching, but we have been able to really help the Müllers a lot, for which they have been very grateful. They are planning on taking us out to eat next week some time to say thank you to us.

Dad. I think you need to reexamine what a question is. Let's take a look at what your question number four was, and I quote, ' I’m sure happy to hear that you are strangely happy in Passau.  That sure will help you in your post-mission life as you are able to make any situation better through your effort and attitude' I don't know about you, but I definitely failed to see a inquiry in these statements. Maybe you should make another section of your email that is simply labeled, 'Statements'. Just food for thought.

I am still getting along really well with the members, in fact Brother Müller and I bonded yesterday on the way home from his house, because we found out that we both don't really like watermelon because we both think that it tastes like cucumbers, which we both hate. He is the first person who hasn't laughed at me for not liking cucumbers, because I absolutely hate them. I eat everything else, mushrooms, vegetables...other foods, you name it and I eat it, but not cucumbers. Also I guess I only eat watermelon when I have to.

So. As for strange stories. Well, you are lucky that I delayed my Pday this week, because something happened last night, or rather this morning, that was pretty weird. Well, so I went to bed at 10:30, totally normal, actually scratch that. We went to bed at like 10:00, because the work we do at the Müllers is super hard work, and so we were really exhausted. Not important. Anyway, so I wake up at about one o'clock this morning to someone klingeling us (Note from Daniel: "Klingel" is German for "ring", as in ring the doorbell. Every apartment building has doorbells outside it, and the residents have intercoms to communicate with those ringing the bell). I thought I would just ignore it, because I figured it was just some punk kid with his friends or something. Finally I walked to our little phone thing, that lets you talk with people down at the door, because I assumed it was someone klingeling there. I was a little rude over the phone actually...I just said, 'What?' and then waited, and then kind of said 'Who's there?' And then we were klingled again, and so I said, 'Ok, I'm coming down there'. So then I got dressed, and we were about to go out when we heard a knock at the door. I then realized that somebody must have been ringing the door from inside the building, and not from outside in front of the building. I opened the door up (by the way, this is all kind of a blur right now. I was really tired and confused), and this girl was there, and said in English `Do you speak German?` (I'm actually still confused about this, I have no idea why she had any reason to assume that I wasn't German), and when I told her I did she explained to me in very rapid German (high German luckily), that the building smelled like smoke and she had called the fire department and we all had to leave the building. So we went outside and stood around with everyone else from our building while the fire department came and put out a small fire which somehow had started directly below us. And then it got a little weirder, because this girl, who doesn't live in our building, and was just on her way to go party with her friends, came up to us and told us that we could stay with her if we didn't have anywhere else to stay. She insisted on giving us her number, and told us to call her if we needed to come and stay with her. Right after she walked away, I was just like, We are definitely not doing that, Elder Barker. Luckily it never came to that point, and we eventually got back into our building. Falling asleep again was pretty hard though, because I kept having this image in my brain of these firefighters running around and yelling in angry sounding German to each other.

Well, there we go. that was my week and a half. I'm going to be writing you in a few days anyway, and so I'm not really concerned about writing you more today. Love you all!!

Love,
Elder Merkley

No comments:

Post a Comment