Doing awesome

As far as MY Thanksgiving was concerned, as you know, NO one celebrates it here, since it's an American thing, so when we visited one of the elderly members of our ward, Sis. Raddewagen, I explained to her what we do and she was like, "you sit around and just eat?" Yeah, most people we talked to that day had no idea what Thanksgiving is, so that was kinda funny. We worked like normal all day and had some great success with dooring in Student Wohnheims (two new investigators because of it!) and we celebrated during lunch by getting Streuselschnecken at the Bäckerei and then at the end of the day around 8pm we went to the Bahnhof and got our Thanksgiving "feast"--I got the largest, most delicious Döner auf die Erde and Sis. Anderson got McDonalds! For my dessert I also got my first Magnum bar of the mission! Es lohnt sich! Don't worry, we took pictures! :) Instead of Black Friday shopping, today for Pday we plan on having fun in our local Weihnachtmarkt! Don't worry, I won't really buy anything since I'm waiting to see Dresden's big Weihnachtmarkt! We're not sure if we're doing it next Monday or the one after that, but is it okay if I pull out money for the occasion? I won't really do anything until next Monday after emails, so I will have time to wait for your response. I don't think we'll go next Monday because I think our Temple trip is next week and we can't afford to do too much travelling in one week!

This week was absolutely NUTS. We found a new appointment everyday, which meant that luckily for us, a lot of them went through, they showed up, we've been giving out Book of Mormons in all kinds of languages! But before I get ahead of myself, I'll just go day by day and that way I'll remember everything.

First off, we have goals to meet with a member once a day (at least) and visit people with birthdays, so we've been getting to know our ward better. My lieblings is Sis. Zander and Sis. Lehman--both so adorable and artsy! I think it's just standard for every awesome German to just have the coolest mugs ever. I like meeting with members because they're so lieb and so nice and the German for me comes out more quickly, too! Although it's kinda hard to quatsch auf Deutsch sometimes because I'm still learning vocab. So usually it's charades or "I don't know the word auf deutsch but it looks like..." But it's really fun! Members rock!

A funny story though; our ward roster doesn't show everyone by family, but by seperated names and such, so when we see a name in the roster, chances are we don't really know who to match the name with. This week we saw that a member had a birthday and made cookies and a card for a "Bruder Ritter" and went to the address. Well it was 100% hilarious, because "Bruder Ritter" just celebrated his 2nd birthday this week! The card is now 10x funnier because it isn't address to a kid, but to an adult. There's like 7 kids/babies in our ward, what are the chances, y'know? Everyone thought it was funny, and it was a REALLY good way to get to know a family in the ward better! haha

We also had a Conference call on Tuesday from Pres. Pimentel about our Christmas goals for the month called Der Advent der Wunder, where we've got specific goals each week that go with the advent candle tradition that we do at home. The candles represent Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love which also correspond with our missionary work Faith, Repentance, Baptism, Holy Ghost and Find, Teach, Baptize and Keep. Our goals go along with these things and it gives us fun things to study, and lots of miracles to look forward to!

I don't know why, but I've started to do a lot of knitting, which started because of our Knitting Investigator, but it's actually a lot more fun than I thought. I still have time to do other important things, and journalling of course, but I keep finding myself knitting! I found a Christmas star pattern and I just finished it, ack! I'm like a granny! But I only do little small projects, I don't plan on knitting scarfs or anything. Yarn is pretty cheap (.89 euro cent) but it's funny, just funny. I'll definitely send pictures!

Okay, so our cool miracle for this week had (I think) to do with dooring in the Student Wohnheims right by our apt. We were at church yesterday like usual and a student from Nigeria came in and sat by Sis. Anderson--all by himself, we've never met him before! But wait, I've met him before! He's a friend of one of our investigators, Evidence and Evidence introduced us to his friend, Arinze. Anyway, Arinze saw our card on the floor of some random Wohnung and just decided to come to church! We already plan on meeting with him because he wants to read the Book of Mormon! I think it was a major miracle, because we just did a little thing--dooring and handing out our passalong cards, but Heavenly Father did the rest! And I think he understands as well as we do, that finding ANYONE on the streets, let alone with interest, on Advent Sundays--yeah it's pretty tough. Talk about bringing people to US!

Here's another fun bit. Sis. Anderson just -happens- to be writing an Elder serving in Denmark (one of the Elders in the MTC told her to write this guy), and we decided it would be kinda funny for her to write some dansk in the letter just to throw him for a loop. So Sis. Anderson gave me sentences to translate, and by golly, I still got it! It was funny that some words just totally escaped me because I really speak and use a lot more German than I realize, and so I'm thinking to myself, "what's the word for 'will'??" and then a minute later it comes, phew! I still get letters from dansk venner serving in Denmark now or back and BYU so I get a little practice here and there with reading and writing. Sometimes our members ask me to say stuff in dansk, which is fun but weird, because I'm not perfect at deutsch, but it's hard to switch over to dansk! Mom and I will have to speak tons of deutsch and dansk when I ever come home! :P

One last thing, my favorite missionary story for this week. It's kinda a joke between us missionaries and Sis. Wunder, since she talks to us the most about our work, is that we talk to a lot more investigators, contacts off the street that AREN'T deutsch, because the Cottbusers are just like any Germans, stuck in what they want to believe (or not believe). So I find this story interesting. We were OYMing in a little park and there were two people about to walk by us, so Sis. Anderson had us split and we each talk to these guys rather than just one and miss the other. She talked to an African (there are a lot here because of the university here) and I talked to the German, both students. The German guy actually stayed and asked me questions and I got to teach him the 2nd lesson right there on the spot! A lot of times people ask me why I came alll the way from the US to talk about God and I told him that the knowledge I have makes life easier because I know that he's there to help me and I know why I'm here. He then asked, "Well then, why am I here?" and so I told him! As usual, students don't have time, and plan everything day by day, but he took my card and said he'd try and call us back to hear more before I leave (which I said Christmas because that's the end of the transfer and I don't know what'll happen after that!) But that was cool! Talking to students my age is a lot easier than talking to grumpy old people, that's for sure!

So that's the deal-i-o with me this week. We taught 22 lessons this week! That's a big number for us, and we're lovin it! We hope to stay busy and regardless we stay happy! Sis. Anderson loves missionary work and gets me pumped up for it everyday, so we're a fun team. I'm so happy everyone had an exciting Thanksgiving and everything at home is going well! I miss you guys and can't wait to hear more from you soon!

love,
Whit