Week 13 - May 31, 2010 - Tatabanya, Hungary

Dear Family,

Hungary is good. I still can't believe that I am here. It doesn't seem real. My companion is great. His name is Cheney Elder. He's from Georgia. We are in a town called Tatabánya. (you might want to install the Hungarian Language add on for your computer because I will probably be sending words that have Hungarian characters). Tatabánya is about an hour northwest of Budapest. Its kind of a smaller town, but its been great so far. There are 10 or 12 members here in the "Unit". We meet in a tiny little branch house that used to be a bakery, but I guess they want to turn us into a branch. Cheney Elder is the Unit leader, so we were at the meeting house forever yesterday with all of the meetings about making a branch.

When I was on the plane from France, I kind of got those same pangs of missing you all, even though Ive been away for 3 months already.

That's so crazy that Cami is done with her sophomore year already. I`m glad you are keeping her busy though. It sounds like she is going to have a fun summer. It sounds like you will too with no job.

Yeah, those Nerf guns are different ones. I left the ones that Larissa gave me at home, but someone gave those ones to me at the MTC and I thought it was time they got out of that building so they won't tempt anyone else. So now I have 4 of them. Yay!!

Jimmy went in my carry on because I needed a picture of him in France. You can't really tell it's France from the picture, but it is.

That's pretty exciting that you are writing a book. I'm sure its going to be awesome. Keep me updated with what is happening there. I'm going to start telling people my mom is an author now.

I hope DJ Niebergall enjoys dad as a companion, just tell dad that if he wants DJ to teach the lesson, to give him more notice than "You know you're teaching, right?" as he rings the doorbell.

So this week has been pretty crazy. Getting all settled in and everything. When we got in on Tuesday, we went to the mission home and had dinner and then we went to a big square in Budapest called hero square. It has statues of all the kings of Hungary. It was pretty awesome, but we had to leave when this HUGE stretch hummer thing covered with lights pulled up and all of these drunk teenagers started yelling at us. (I took pictures of all of these things.) After that we went to Gelért Hegy which is a "Mountain" (there are no mountains here. I miss real mountains a lot) inside of Budapest. There is a big fort on top that the Hapsburgs built and now its a monument to the freedom from communism. There's a few big statues, the best of which is a naked guy punching a dragon. Awesome. I took a couple of pictures of Budapest and of the statues.

We slept at the secretaries' apartment that night and got up the next day at 6 because the APs wanted to go running. So we ran for an hour. I wanted to die. But then we got to shower(finally) and went and had breakfast at the Mission Home. Then we went streeting. That was interesting, not speaking the language or anything. After that we got our trainers and headed out. We were able to get a ride with another companionship heading to Győr. I had some time to unpack and then we went streeting. In the time between then and now, we've gone streeting and tracting (I had my first door slammed in my face) and did some teaching. We don't have many investigators right now, so most of the time is spent looking. That's about all that we've done.

On Saturday, I did get to go to a festival called A Tatai Pataran. It was like a Renaissance fair, except it was cool. It was all around this old castle and was actually a celebration of when a Hungarian force took the castle (the one we were at) from a force of Turks. The had a reenactment of the battle, and a bunch of stalls to buy random crap. It was legit.

That was my week. I hope you all have a good week. I love you all. I'll be sending home pictures soon. Be safe and be good. Especially Cami and Simba.

Crouch Elder