Sunday, October 25, 2015

October 24, 2015



What did we do this week?


On Wednesday morning, Elder Watson and I took a road trip down to Szeged to visit the zone training there and have our splits with the zone leaders there. It was pretty fun driving down there, since before that I'd just driven around the transportation mess here in Budapest. Driving in the city is pretty crazy because if you're in the wrong lane and can't get over fast enough, you're taken on a twenty minute detour before you can make it back to the turn that you wanted to take. The roads are almost always full of cars, and the road signs here are the most confusing things ever. In lots of places, the road is two or more lanes with no lane line markers painted on the pavement, and you just have to kind of guess where to put your car between to others. Scooters and motorcycles have permission to drive between and around cars and trucks whenever they feel like it's appropriate and safe to do that, which makes it pretty sketchy because they fly by through your blind spot at the speed of light. There's almost never speed limit signs, so you just have to kind of guess how fast to drive based on how fast everyone else is going. And at intersections, the line where you stop your car is often placed somewhere so that you can't see the actual light turning green when you're waiting to go, because the actual signal light is directly over the roof of the car. Drivers use their horns and brights to communicate and signal that someone should go or stop or whatever. Other than that, though, driving in Budapest is a piece of cake. ;)

But driving on the highway is fun! The lanes are actually almost as big as American ones there, and you don't have to worry so much about which lane you're in because there's only two. They have speed traps set up every once in a while, but no one ever gets caught because they know where they all are. People fly by going 160+ km/hr, but it's not too bad because they flick their brights real fast to tell you to get out of the way and they're out of your hair. It's fun driving again, though! It's just pretty exhausting. I think I've fallen asleep in about 2 minutes every day that we drive to different places.

We just had a really good planning session for our next week, and we've got another busy schedule ahead of us. The sun's been shining for the past couple of days, which has been really nice. Other than that, it's all about the same! We've got a day in the office with president on Monday, training the new missionaries this week on Tuesday, traveling to Győr on Wednesday, Szombathely on Thursday, back to Budaon Thursday afternoon, working on our own missionary stuff on Thursday night and Friday, and then we're already back to Saturday again!

Anyways, hope you all have a good week! Love ya! :)






Buildings on the side of the Duna


























Gellért Hegy from the Pest side













Sad trash can that someone wrote "immigrants" on













Budapest at night!





Saturday, October 17, 2015

October 17, 2015


Hi!

I hope it’s sunny where you are, because it’s been pretty cloudy and rainy here for the past two weeks or so. I think it’s the longest I’ve ever gone without seeing blue sky. We saw a few little patches of blue this morning as we went outside to work out, and we have hope now that maybe it’ll be better weather this week.

It might have been some gloomy weather this week, but we still had a couple of cool things happen this week here in Buda! Last weekend, we had someone call us from Romania who was originally from Kispest in Hungary. Turns out, she’s a member of the church and her friend, Constantine, was coming here to Budapest to visit for about two days. He’s an artist, and he has a couple of his paintings in the exhibition at a nearby art gallery in Budapest, just a ten minute walk from the mission home, and we were asked to help him find his way around town a little bit and to show him some of the most awesome things to see in Budapest. Afterwords, we went with him to see his work at the art gallery, and it was a lot of fun! European art is crazy weird, and the gallery was pretty much just filled with hipsters and artists who try to make things deeper and more meaningful than they actually are. I’m pretty positive I’d rather go for a hike or camping or something fun and adventurous like that, but it was good to pretend to be a cultured, classy art enthusiast for an hour! :)

The rest of the week has pretty much been filled with programs with a lot of our friends here in Buda and preparing the mission leadership council meeting that happened here on Wednesday. It was a bit strange to be in the meeting and trying to teach all of the missionaries that have been out here for more than a year longer than I have and who are way more experienced than I am. It was good though, and I hope that everyone liked what we talked about and that it helped someone!

We found some missionary’s Christmas music CD collection the other day and have been listening to it a lot recently. It’s probably not healthy to, because Christmas is still another two and a half months away, but we all like it so much that it might just be a long season of Christmas music. Halloween’s not really a thing here, mostly just for the YSA program here in Buda. That kind of gets skipped over, and Thanksgiving is very much just an American thing, so it looks like Christmas is the next holiday for us! Pretty excited for that.

Anyways, gotta run soon, but hope that the weather’s nice and everything’s going well at home! Be happy and have adventures with the people that you care about. We’ll talk again next week!



Art Market Budapest














Someone painted a car













This thing is worth thousands of dollars... crazy, right?















I don't even know how to caption this















Costel and his paintings














Tried to mimic the first presidency as 
the AP's (the Germans are on the right)





Sunday, October 11, 2015

October 10, 2015



Again, not much time to email today because we've just been kept really really busy, but wanted to send you a quick email today because our p-days are now on Saturdays as AP's since we have to work in the office on Mondays. Hope that everything is okay back at home with everyone... love you all lots and I'll talk to you some more next week when I have a little bit more time to plan out what I'm going to write. Until then, I hope that the pictures from this week will do enough justice. :)




New comps in the mission office!














Elder Dalton and the Niki's from Kispest!















All the crew of missionaries from Kispest and some 
of our friends outside Szent Istven's Baszilika


















Went and visited the Basilica in the middle of Pest.
You can pay very small fee and climb to the very
top of the dome and the view is awesome!






Tuesday, October 6, 2015

October 6, 2015


Sup!

Transfers are back again. Crazy how fast that 9 weeks was... especially since I spent about 3 in Buda and then the other 6 here in Kispest with Dalton! We got our transfer calls this morning to see who's going where and what's going to happen to all the different groups of missionaries all over the country. Dalton and I pretty much expected him to leave Kispest and for me to stay and get another missionary in the city. Based on all of the transfers prior to this one, transfers were fairly predictable based on things like, how big the group of new missionaries coming into the country is, how many people are leaving the country, who's been a trainer already, who hasn't, how long someone's been in one city, whether or not they've been in a leadership position like zone leader and so forth, and that kind of a thing. For the most part, transfers were also not too big, and people were mostly transferred when they needed to be or if they had just been somewhere for a long time. This transfer, though, is huge and moved all of the missionaries around and didn't really follow any of the prior rules of missionary transfers.

Anyways, long story short, I'll be going back to Buda, which is uncommon. Dalton's leaving Kispest and going to serve in Pápa, one of the smaller cities in the country, and a lot of other big changes are going around.

That's most of the big changes for this week, everything else is pretty much the same. Looks like I'm moving again! I'll let you all know how everything's going in Buda next week when we're more settled-in. Until then, hope you all have a great week and that everything's going good. Love you!






Found a running club sponsored by Nike here
in Budapest.... pretty dang cool stuff














Probably favorite picture from Hungary so far
















Beerbike Budapest















Bought some stuff from the American store
to make treats for Conference!















Flower picture for Chelsea