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| Goodbye to Syster Davis! |
WOW WOWOWOWOW. SWEDEN. Holy cow I'm actually here. And their keyboards are all different so if there's randomly some weird symbol in the middle of things, that's why. The different letters are where the apostraphes and things used to be so then the question mark is in a new location and basically this is just the icing on the cake to my life being turned upside down.
SO, yeah. We came to Sweden. We got up at 2am on Monday to go to the airport. and HEY we got our visas. yayyy. So we flew to Chicago first and and they did the seats by alphabetical order so I was sitting by Äldste Moulton and basically we were trying to talk to each other but we just kept falling asleep. I was telling him such an engaging story and then realized he had fallen asleep again so we just gave up at that point. In Chicago we met up with the 11 elders who visa waited the past 6 weeks and they were on our plane to Germany with us. The flight was an actual eternity. There was a whole bunch of sleeping, drooling missionaries all over the place. I watched one of the best movies I've ever seen during the flight: the little video of the plane moving across the map of the world so you can see where you are. Way interesting and engaging. Then when we got to Germany we had like 45 minutes to get to our flight going to Sweden. So we all (now 26 of us) hurried to the customs place where we would have to show our passports and visas and stuff. And they let like 5 people through and then they just stopped us and wouldn't let us through anymore. They had us all go wait by the wall and we were trying to show them our visas and tell them we would only be there for 24/18 months but that just threw them for a loop that we weren't all staying for the same amount of time. It got to the point where there were 5 minutes until our plane was going to leave. LEAVE. not board. like actually just peace out and leave us stranded in the Frankfurt airport. Then all of a sudden they just started letting us through. They got all 20 of us that were left through the passport check and then for some reason they just had us bypass all the customs and bags being check and this security guy led us through all these back doors and secret passageways and they delayed the take off for us and we all got on the airplane and got to Sweden! It was crazy. And legit.
We got here and President and Sister Beckstrand took us sightseeing and then we all went back to a church for a little orientation and driving video that we had to watch. We were all SO tired. You don't even understand. It was rough. We were all just falling asleep as they were talking to us. Then when it was time for the little video they were like, Okay, you HAVE to watch this so if you start to fall asleep go stand up in the back. Immediately half of us went to the back to stand up. But then it was just a mess because I fell asleep standing up and had to sit down.
Sister Bateman was there, Dad. And she was like, My dad is obsessed with you!! He keeps obsessing over us meeting! Haha it was way funny.
Then the next day we all got assigned! All the trainers came to the church with us and we would go up one at a time and open our envelopes and then our trainer would come up to the front. It was fun. My trainer is Syster Crawford and I'm serving in Jakobsberg! It's pretty close to Stockholm.
This week has consisted of a lot of firsts: first time in Europe, first time in Sweden, first time eating an unidentifiable food, first time contacting, first time sitting through relief society and actually not understanding a single word, first time fasting for a full 24 hours, first time being the coldest I've ever been in my life (i say it's the first time because i'm sure i'll be the "coldest i've ever been in my life" again), first time teaching and real life investigator. It's been fun and scary and embarrassing and humbling and scary and scary and cold.
My trainer is the absolute best though. She's so nice and is always serving me and helping me do hard things and covering me when i literally have no clue what's happening because turns out I don't know this language at all even though I thought I was dece.
We went at taught a less active, Kristin the other day and she was probably the sweetest person I've ever met in my life. She got out a notebook to take notes on the things that we were saying and she took notes on how we said that we had Distrikts meeting that morning and had set goals. She was like, "I just want to know everything that you do!" And she had little gifts for us and she was just so nice.
Everyone has been so nice. The ward members kept saying my Swedish was good and they gave us little christmas gifts and oh I love them. Some people in this ward speak spanish as their native language so i've got to remember some spanish!
But yeah, Sweden is a great time.
I'm super lucky because the man we teach the most, Theo, can't speak Swedish so like I actually participate in lessons.
But it's actually hard to learn Swedish here because everyone speaks english so they will just switch over to that so you understand. But then I'm like nooo speak Swedish so I can practice and then just don't even know what's being said anymore. But i'm getting better!
I see Syster Campbell once a week too because she's in my distrikt as well. So that's nice, a familiar face.
Love you all!
Puss och kram,
Syster May
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