Paris France: week 2 in MULHOUSE!

Bonjour mes amis!

comment ça va?? vous allez bien? how is everyone? so it's my second week in france! second week in mulhouse. and it's pretty exciting. i'm not going to lie, the first week was super hard. it's hard getting used to the missionary life. the mtc prepares you for a lot of things, but not really for the mission life. it's so much different than the mtc. you actually do things with your day instead of just studying haha. so anyway, this week was good. the mindset that i kinda have to keep is that this is life. my mission is all that matters, because a lot of the time i find myself thinking about after the mission and other stuff like that that is important, but not at the moment. so when i forget about that and honestly just do what president hinckley said and forget yourself and go to work, it's a lot easier and i'm a more effective missionary. oh so also, here are my profound thoughts for the week. Beavers are gross. i've never seen them before, but we have some that live in the basin next to us, and they are disgusting. i finally know how they filmed the scene in Princess Bride with the ROUS (editors note: Rodents of Unusual Size). they just used a beaver. because that's exactly what they look like. so gross. ROUS ftw haha. next, funny fact, every box of cigarettes that you buy here, has on it "fumer tue" in huge letters. which litterally means, smoking kills haha. so they have that on every box of cigarettes that you can buy, just as a reminder to everyone that they are going to die if they continue being dumb and smoking. too bad it doesn't help anyone... everyone here still smokes. viva la france ha. third, the malk (editors note: milk) here is terrible! no not really, but it's kinda weird. you don't even have to refridgerate it. kinda gross, but it's whatevs. silly malk. so yeah, anyway, here is what i did this week.

Monday

this was last p-day, and we actually went to the train museum. cool huh? haha it was actually pretty lame... i discovered that day that i wasn't really a train guy. trains don't do much for me. but cool fact of the day, i don't know if i told you this last email or not, but the fastest train in the world, or at least the one that holds the world record, is called the TGV. and we have riden on a couple of them. the world record is 574.8 km/h. that's fast. but yeah we went there with the rest of our district, which is colmar and belfort. you can look those up on a map if you want. and we shopped and stuff which was fun, since we literally had nothing in the fridge to eat. but don't fret, we're stocked up now. and me and elder coleman, as it turns out, are such amazing cooks. we're thinking about going famous. we're going to make a cook book too. we're going to call it "how to cook AND enjoy your lunch hour", because all of our recipes take less than like 30 minutes. we're kinda cool. also, speaking of which, mom, do you perchance want to send me a cookbook, or just a couple of recipes at least? because we got a cookbook for our mission, but it kinda gets boring after awhile, we need fresh meat. just recipes like soggy bottom biscuits or texas sheet cake and garlick mashed potatoes and just everything!

Tuesday

We had district meeting this day. we learned some stuff about how to begin teaching, and then we ate lunch after. twas great. then after this, i went on exchanges with the DL. named elder aarif. so i went to colmar, and honestly, it was so pretty! it's like super alsacian there which is the name of this part of france, and it's just a cute little tourist town. i didn't take any pictures though since we were contacting and i didn't want to look like a tourist. but it was super cool. anyway, we did some contacting for awhile, and then we went to a lesson. the lady that we taught though, funny story. so she is married to a member, and i guess essentially, she set her own baptismal date. the missionaries honestly did nothing. so we were kinda just teaching random stuff that she should know before baptism because she honestly pretty much knew everything else. so we taught about temple work and geneology. it was a good lesson and it was cool to be with someone else that could speak french well to learn some new things. then we went home and ate crepes for dinner and it was simply magical.

wednesday

i woke at the usual time and did some studies and then boarded a train back to mulhouse. then we ate some lunch and did some contacting. yes if you are wondering, that is mostly what we do each day, and no, most of the time, it's not too effective. but then after, we went to teach a lesson to someone we found on a random paper that said calls for august, but we had no other record of her. her name was cécil, and she was a true african. she wore boo boos just like a real african does. super cool. but she was great. i guess she had met with the missionaries before so we kind of just retaught the restoration. she is an evangelist and her husband had heard a lot of good things about the church, and i guess he had a lot of questions, so next time we teach her, we are going to teach them both, because he wasn't there today. anyway, we talked for awhile and then taught our short restoration review, and then gave her a soft invitation, as in when you come to know these things are true, will you be baptized. and at first she didn't understand it, because she said she had already been baptized in her church, so we tried, as delicately as we could, to explain that it wasn't exactly valid, but it was good, and it's honestly a super hard subject to talk about, because you really don't want to offend them, but you have to make them understand the priesthood. but anyway, we think she took it well and said that if she knows these things are true, she would. so we'll see if that goes anywhere. then next we taught joni and cherazad. then are a couple that are just a great couple, with a cute little daughter than is around 2 i think, the only problem is that they aren't married yet. so today we talked about that. we brought a member, frere mortz with us, and honestly, we didn't say anything the whole time. he completely taught the whole lesson. i guess that's just the kind of guy that he is. It was a good lesson overall. so hopefully that affected them in the right way. but that's mostly all this day. oh side note, my comprehension has improved soooo much this week. i'm getting used to the super fast talking, so i can actually understand most of the conversations now! it's great. there are always words that i don't quite understand, but i can usually understand most of it. it's so much better. God really does answer prayers, because the first week, i was so frustrated, but i prayed for that, and it came so much quicker than i expected. woo haha.

thursday

so we woke up and did some studying, and then we did some contacting, and then we went to the durand famille for lunch, and they are great. they a couple, probably in around their fifties, whose kids are all gone and married, some in the states, but they love missionaries. they are super nice too. so we ate with them for awhile, for like 2 hours actually, because here, you don't eat quickly. so you kind of just have to go with it. it was super good though. then after that we headed home, and were kinda bleh that we had had like no success. so what we did, is decided to get the Lord involved. so we prayed and asked him to lead us where we needed to go to find people who were ready for the gospel. and we did that right in front of the map, and we both had the same feeling about where we should go. so we then hopped on a bus and contacted whoever we stood next to, and then got off, and did porting in the neighborhood that we ended up in. and yeah, the public transportations here is amazing. it's honestly so good and nice. that is one thing that france has down. they have tons of buses and also 3 tram lines. it's great. so i got a pass for 37 euros when i got here and now we ride it everyday so often. it's great. but anyway, back to the story, we did porting (editors note: tracting? ) in the area, and no real success, but we get back to the bus stop, and do one last house before we leave. a little boy answers the door, and so we say hi is your papa there and he goes and gets him. they were a super cute family. they were catholic, but they said that they would listen to our message, but they didn't have time now, so come back another day around 4. it was terrif. anyway, to make a long story short, we ended up getting 3 new contacts that day! it's amazing what happens when you really ask the lord with faith.

friday

i'm getting bored of writing and stuff so i'm just going to tell the highlight. we had a RDV (rendez-vous) with someone in the morning at our church, so we get on the tram and head that direction. we are on it, and on the first stop, a lady with a stroller hops on and sits right next to me. and elder coleman was sitting a couple of seats away, so it was just me. so i started a conversation, just about her and her son, who was super cute, and it turns out he is 20 months, and so i told her i had a niece that was almost that age and we just talked about that for awhile, and then i changed the subject to why i was here and such, and i told her we had a message about jesus christ that maybe we could share? and she said she had to get off the next stop, so i asked if we could just exchange numbers and we could call her later to set up a rdv. and she said YES! and i did it all by myself. it was super great.

saturday

we taught 2 lessons which was cool.

sunday

oh boy, what a day. we had stake conference in nancy, so we got on a train at 710am to go there. we meet up with the other elders in our district and head out. we get about halfway there, and we are jsut sitting there, and then out of nowhere, we hear something, and then it sounds like rocks are flying up and hitting the train. so that was weird. but then the train stops like 5 seconds later, and i guess as it turns out, someone had jumped in front of our train..... so then we sat there for awhile just waiting for them to do whatever they do, and then we went to the closest station and waited another hour for another train, and to make a long story short, we completely missed stake conference. it started at 1030 and we didn't get there until 1ish. and our train back was at 2. so honstely the whole day we were just on a train. and i guess that kind of thing happens often around here... but yeah, you can edit out this story if you think it's too graphic or whatever. but yeah, so that was interesting.

so yeah, that's all, time to go shopping! love you all!

elder meyers

ps, i wrote this all with a french keyboard. be proud