A week full of adventures!!

Wow! This week has been the craziest week just full of all sorts of adventures! It has been a really good week.

Tuesday we went out and spent a lot of time tracting. No one was really home and we werent having much success. We lost track of time and were in a hurry to come back for a program and as we were running back we both noticed this young kid standing on another road that was out of the way from where we needed to go. We both stopped, looked at each other, and then decided to go talk to him. He spoke really good english and as we talked to him he told us that he thought the purpose of life was to party and have fun and that was what heaven was going to be like to. I will be honest...I was a little bit frustrated that we had stopped to talk to him becuase the conversation was going no where and we were going to be really late. So we ended to conversation with him and started on our way back to the branch house. 5 minutes later we hear someone say 'hey wait!' It was him and he said that he had changed his mind after we left and said that he still needed to talk to us more. He said he didnt realize it until we left, but he felt really good when he was talking to us. He felt in his words 'like what you were talking about was right'. Unfortunately he doesnt live in Hungary but we told him where he could find more information.

Then begins our little fun adventure for the week. We had Elder José S. Teixeira come and speak to us for zone Conference on Thursday. He is the area president over Europe. So we had to leave on a train at 5 in the morning meaning that we had to get up at 4. We were going to get some sleep on the train cause it is a 4 hour train ride but that didnt happen. The conference was awesome!! I learned so much and Elder Teixeira did a lot of interactive teaching with us which was nice because I would have probably fallen asleep if he hadnt. He had us a lot of questions to help us teach our investigators and everything he said was honestly just like an answer to my prayers! It was awesome. And then his wife got up and spoke and she challenged us all to read the BOM in under 60 days. There are 60 days left in the year and that is how long it took Joseph Smith to translate the BOM. I have started that this week and it has really been a cool experience so far! I am currently reading the BOM in 3 different parts. I just started reading the BOM this week so I am in the beginning, I am in the middle reading in Hungarian, and I am almost finished with the BOM from when I started in the MTC (ya I am just a little bit of a slow reader haha!) But it has been so interesting to read in all three places. The BOM no matter where you are reading is always testifying of Christ. I just feel like I have been flooded with this power of the BOM this week as I have spent all my spare time reading it. It trully is an amazing powerful book!

Anyways, back to our little adventure...conference was super good. So good that it went a little over time and we missed our 4:30 train. So we decided to just take the 7:30 one and get home a little late. Well we got to the train station at 7:30 and we waited and waited and waited for our train to come. And it didnt. It was 9 and it still hadnt come and we knew we wouldnt be getting home til 2 or 3 in the morning so we got permission to stay in Buda. That was a lot of fun but pretty crazy. There were already some missionaries staying there so there were no beds. Anyways, it was a long night and we ended up getting up again at 4 to try and catch a train back to Nyíregháza. Turns out the train in the morning was too full and they wouldnt let us on. Then come to find out, Nov. 1st was a big holiday and they werent going to have trains running the rest of the day. They said that there was one other train we could take so we literally ran clear across Buda to try to catch the train. It was so crazy! We were all so sleep deprived. We ended up making the train but it was full also so we got to STAND in this tiny little compartment by the bathroom on the train. for 4 hours! We were so exhausted by the time we got home, but it was actually really fun. We made the best out of it we could. And I have never been so grateful for sleep that night that I got to finally get 8 hours of sleep in my own bed! Hungary and the holidays!

Speaking of the holiday, it was the coolest holiday. It was minden Szentek Napja. (All saints day or Day of the dead). It is a huge holiday where everyone visit their relatives graves and brings flowers and leave candles on their graves. It is symbolic of bringing light to their deceased ancestors who are in the dark. The cemetaries looked so cool! We got to go with one of the members to see it and she was explaining everything to us. Graves here are crazy. It was really cool to see though.

On Saturday morning (after finally getting a good sleep) we woke up to realize that we had totally forgotten that we were planning the halloween party for the branch that night and we had forgotten to get things for games. We also realized that we would be the only missionaries there also. So we spent all day Saturday trying to get everything ready. NOTHING was falling into place and we were pretty stressed out. But we just did the best we possibly could. In the morning I really felt like we specifically needed to invite one investigator that we have been trying to get to come to church for a long time. I kept fighting it because honestly I didnt know how well the party was going to turn out. But we passed her work place and I finally just told my companion that we should just invite her. We invited her and she actually came!!! The party turned out so well! (you all dont call me party girl for nothing haha) everything just came together perfectly and everyone had a really good time. And M (the lady we invited) Loved being there. At the end, I just asked her if she was going to come to church and she said YES!!!! It was wonderful and totally worth the stress for the party!

She came to church and brought her 2 little boys - ages 6 and 4. M loved church. We werent expecting her to bring her 2 little boys so I really think Heavenly Father was helping me use my creative juices to keep the boys occupied in sacrament meeting. It even got to the point where I was taking our free english class papers out and making paper airplanes with them during sacrament meeting. It was so great though! M was going to leave after sacrament but then she decided to stay for all 3 hours which was huge for her!!!! She went to primary with her kids and we had an awesome lesson and everything went better than I could have pictured. It was a perfect sacrament meeting. And she said she is going to come again next week!

Everything is really just starting to come together here! I love being a missionary. We have seen so many miracles and tender mercies this week. I wish I could just go through and describe them all. Being a missionary is really the best feeling in the world. It is a lot of work. and a lot of stress. But it is all worth it. It has been a great transfer and I have felt like I have grown a lot. 10 weeks is a long time. This is the last week of the transfer (next week I will be emailing on tuesday). Thanks for all your love and support! I love oyu all!

Falslev Nővér

some of the members and us tabling. This was a while ago

Rupard, me and Elder Gaytán at 6 in the morning at McDonalds trying to figure out how to get back to Nyíregyháza.

This was our little 'compartment' we got to stand in. Everyone loved it when they got to climb over us to go to the bathroom.  Great times! There we 6 of us and we had a lot of fun just talking and telling stories. It made the 4 hours go by fast! :)

some of the pictures of the graves. i dont know how well you can see them

 she is the member that took us to see the graves. She is pretty much a missionary with us. She goes everywhere with us! I love her!

these are cremation boxes. A lot of people are cremated here.

I was a cowgirl for Halloween

My personal favorite....so funny! The people loved this game!

the little kids ate cookies! So funny! They loved it!

. (can you tell who won? If you were wondering, it was me!!!!) haha! 

 This was so hard! This was actual bread ( I couldnt find donuts to do it with). It was so fun!

Is there paprika (peppers) that look something like this in America? Mom and dad do you think you could plant some peppers like this in the garden next year before I come home? :) It doesnt matter what color. If not, I'll bring some stuff to plant them. 

So this is one of her relatives. On the grave headstone thing all 4 sides are filled with the names of people who have died there. In Hungary, no one is buried fully under the ground. All their graves are above ground. And this is how it works: so someone dies, they are put in a coffin. Their body decomposes and then their bones are taken out of the coffin and put into another coffin. Another person in the family dies and is put in a coffin (so there are two coffins in the grave -one with just bones and the other with a decompoising body). Then when that body decomposes, it is added to the other coffin with bones in it. So they can just keep burying and burying people in the same grave. I would not like to be the person who deals with the bones haha.