Lots of Rain! 10/13/14

Hej!

     This week it rained pretty much every day. It is also pretty windy, so the rain goes a little sideways. It made having an umbrella interesting if it accidentally got caught in the wind and went inside out. But it was a fun week. 

     Last P-day I bought a good winter coat. It has fur in the hood, so it looks kind of funny, but luckily it is removable for times when I want to look a little more serious, haha. Also last P-day we played basketball with a 19 year old from the branch. We were playing outside when it was like 5 degrees, haha. 

     On Wednesday we got a call from the zone leaders telling us to move from our apartment into the sisters´ and a senior missionary couples´ old apartments. So we and the other elders moved out Thursday morning. I have a bit too much stuff, since I´ve bought a couple coats since coming here. But I managed to get it all there. Our new apartment is super nice. It smells good since sisters used to live there, it´s clean, it has a dishwasher, and there are heated tile floors in the entryway, kitchen, and bathroom. It´s pretty awesome. And also I´ve noticed it is a lot easier to focus when there is only the two of us in the apartment rather than 4. But the other elders live in the same building as us, so we still see them a lot.

     Transfers are this week. One of the elders here is being transferred, but the other one will be training! And we also found out that one of the new sisters coming here will also be a greenie! So now half of our district will be greenies. I´m super excited for it. This means I won´t be the newest missionary in the district anymore! I´m excited to tell the new missionaries some of the things I´ve learned and see how their Swedish is. We are thinking about doing greenie splits sometime, which would be fun but not too effective I think. Also, we found out that the sister coming here that is training is named Sister Smith. So I am expecting a lot of jokes from the members in our branch about that, haha. But I was talking to a member yesterday at church and apparently there have been a lot of times where an elder and sister have had the same or very similar last names here. So it will be interesting.

     Right now we pretty much just have one investigator who is really progressing. He is the one with a baptismal date. He quit snus and coffee last week, and hasn´t used them since. But he has been having a lot of trouble sleeping, and went to the doctor on Friday about it. We haven´t heard from him since then, so we are getting kind of worried. Hopefully everything is okay.

     In the second half of this week we had almost every appointment get cancelled. But we just went tracting (since it is hard to contact when it´s raining), so it was okay. This week we went tracting in Sodom. It is an actual town here, haha. Me and Elder Stafford tried to find a sign so we could take a picture in front of it, but we couldn´t find one. 

     I have been working a bit on my cooking skills this week. I made grilled cheeses one day, and a few nights ago I made pancakes for dinner, which was fun. We couldn´t find any actual pancake mix at the store, so we just used waffle mix. I think it´s pretty much the same thing. It worked out pretty well in my opinion. 

     I hope everyone has a great week!!

Elder Smith

Pictures:

1) Leaving the apartment in the morning

2) All of the non-Swedish names in Sodom

3) An extra pancake that we stuck on the wall above our door right before the other elders came in. We hoped it would fall on them. It missed, but they definitely weren´t expecting it to happen.

4) All wintered up

5) Brokyrkan. Kyrkan means "the church" in Swedish, so in Swenglish, it could be "the bro church". So we took pictures. We found it while searching for a sign that said Sodom on it. (It actually means "the bridge church")

6) We took off our shoes at this one guy´s house, and he gave us flip flops to wear inside. They looked funny with socks, so we took a picture.