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!

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)

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!

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

September 28, 2015

So this week was too fast! We were kept pretty busy with different programs all over the city, including zone conference on Friday at Hajnoczy József. Real fast to sum up the cool things of this week:

We helped an old lady move one of the dressers from her house out to the street, because she didn't want it anymore. Why she wanted it put there, I have no idea, but it was quite a project.

We had the loudest English class of all time with a ton of crazy, rowdy little kids running around the place.

There was a pretty big rainstorm that came through Budapest on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and part of Sunday, which means that we were wet for a couple of days.

We went to an "escape house" for p-day today, which was awesome. Basically, you pay a fee to be locked in a room with a group, and you have to think and be smart and find the clues and keys in the room to unlock your way out. Lots of fun.

In short, we're doing well and looking forward to General Conference with some of our good friends that we meet with here in Kispest! We're on a delay since there's a time lapse because of translation, but we'll be watching the same thing just a few hours behind the rest of you all! Should be great. :)

Gotta run, but hope everyone has a great week and that life is good and you're happy. Be good and help people:) Love you guys!

I think that some of the subway metro stops in

Budapest look like the hovercarrier from Avengers

Popped our heads into the Hungarian State Opera House 

as we were streeting one day, that was cool

Practicing my writing in old Hungarian 

September 21, 2015

Hey!

Back to Monday again. Not much by way of big news from Budapest, just still here working in Kispest! We're still doing really good, having some pretty good success with meeting with a lot of the people here. We had a jam-packed week last week that was so busy that we were always on the move traveling from one program to another, which was fun! We've even had a few random people on the streets just come up to us and ask us to talk to them about who we are and what we're doing here in Hungary. Pretty cool stuff.

As far as the situation with the immigrants, it's still pretty touchy here. There's thousands of immigrants (like, tens of thousands) waiting outside the southeastern border of Hungary trying to break into the country. The government hastily built up a wall on the border to try to keep them out, but they're trying to push it down in places to get into the nation. The tough thing is that a lot of them actually aren't refugees, but want to take advantage of the opportunity to sneak into Europe by posing as one. They often don't accept food or water that is given to them by humanitarian efforts, and there's been scattered reports about violence between them and the predominantly Christian demographic of Europe. Most don't want to complete the necessary paperwork to become legal citizens, and just want to do what they want to do, which pretty much just means making a mess. I have heard several people say that people are mad at the Hungarian government because of the way they treat them, but it looks like the media isn't telling the whole story... Sounds like when the cameras are out, the refugees and immigrants pose to look starving and abused, and the reporters film only when the Hungarian police try to keep back crowds of immigrants swarming the wall with things like water cannons or rubber bullets. It's a problem...

But other than that, everything else is going well here in Kispest. We spent some time this week cutting wood for one of the old ladies that we know here, which is fun because I've never really had to do that before and it's good to know that she'll have heat for the winter. Fun service projects are the best way to help people, for sure.

Hope that everything is alright back at home! The Hungarians tell us they're a bit scared to see who'll become the next US president, because it might have a big impact on how this immigrant crisis is handled here. Hopefully, everything will work out okay. :)


Love you all lots! Have a great week and be happy. :)

My buddy, Ricky, from Nyíregyháza, works in Budapest on the 

weekends as a Rickshaw driver for tourists in the downtown 

area of the city, and we were able to meet up with him and 

have an awesome time as he drove us around the city on his

rickshaw and even let us try it out, too! It's a lot harder than 

you would think, it's a heavy bike that's pretty long and 

double wide, but it was for sure the coolest way to see the city.

Picture taken with Katolin and the other elders

in front of the Kispest branch house

September 14, 2015

Another week's gone, and now there's only a couple of weeks left before the next transfer... crazy. My MTC group hits it's 10-month mark this week!

Things are going good here in Kispest. We've got lots of really good friends here that we meet with all throughout the week, and it's been cool to even get to teach some piano to some of the people that we meet with. We've been trying to use some of our talents to find new people to talk to as well, so we've been whipping in the park, playing some basketball with some of the kids from the neighborhood, and teaching Enlish again as our English classes have restarted now after the August break.

For the most part, the people that we meet here are pretty normal. Sometimes, though, we meet some interesting characters who are not necessarily as normal... Sometimes that's a very funny thing, but other times it's pretty sad. The other day, we were riding home on the metro right before curfew, and a homeless man who had had a lot to drink started to serenade us on the metro. He started to sing pretty loudly and dance on the metro, kind of making most passengers give him some pretty confused looks. Then, he asked us for money, and proceeded to try to convince us to give him some Forints by doing push-ups and pull-ups on the frame of the tram. When that didn't work, he knelt down and pretended to pray to us. It was a bit discomforting, and kind of sad when we glanced into his open bag on the floor next to him (full of empty bottles, crushed cans, and a few homemade tobacco containers to hold his leaves). Moral of the story: don't do drugs, kids.

As for the refugee situation here in Budapest, it's about the same. There were a couple of marches and demonstrations in parts of town, and a few riots in isolated areas. We get first notice by text message from our zone leaders, though, and we know for the most part where and when those things are going to happen so that can avoid the conflict. There's still lots of refugees around the train stations, but I think the government here is trying to send them either forward or back to where they came from. The Parliament here is catching a lot of flack for not handling the situation any better than they are, and a lot of the people that we meet with tell us that they're frustrated with the way everything's going down.


But we're safe and doing well here in Kispest! Still doing great and trying to help people to be happier here. Hope that everything is going okay back home in AZ, as well. :) Until next week!

Went to get sushi with some of our investigators this week!
Really scared at first (because Hungary is land-locked and
so that sounds dangerous to buy fish and seafood here),
 but it turned out to be okay and none of us got sick!

Gnarly fence outside someone's house... A little bit intimidating.

Went to visit the Budapest zoo for p-day, and they have a 

truck that is part of the tiger's pen. There's the truck, a 

glass window, and the bed of the truck. A tiger 

just happened to be napping in the back.