August 25, 2104

My first thought when I got to New York was astonishment at how different it is from home.  I'm in Plainview right now.  The area is pretty big.  My companion is Elder Byrd and he is from Oregon.  We went to all the meetings at church yesterday.

Our apartment is the top floor of a two story house.  My area is a ward.  The ward is small only about a hundred people were there yesterday.  There is another set of Elders and two sets of Sisters in the area.

I burned my hand this week so I now have second degree burns.

Things are pretty cool.  New York is awesome.  It is extremely diverse.  I feel like we have knocked on a hundred doors trying to find new people to teach.

People here are either super friendly or super rude.  The people here drive crazy.  If you don't go right when the light changes they go nuts and honk a bunch of times.  The roads are super unorganized too, they aren't in a grid pattern like they are in Utah so it's kind of hard to navigate.  The area I'm in looks more like the house area in Salt Lake but much bigger.

August 12, 2014

August 12, 2014

This week has had it's ups and downs but it is getting a little easier.  The Elders in my district are pretty cool.  We all feel like we've known each other for a long time.

The Spirit is really strong here and I feel like I've already changed a lot.  My companion Elder Young is really cool and we are almost exactly the same.  He is from Riverton.  The other day we met the missionaries from the other zone in our district and we all became friends really fast.  We have all grown together as a district and they are all going to New York except for three of the elders.

I can't wait until I finally get to New York.  We fly out Monday morning and the flight is at 7:45 but we have to leave at 3:30.

The food here is ok, it is sort of a hit and miss thing for me.  Feel free to send me some food.

The schedule here is:  wake up at 6:00, breakfast at 7:00, sit in the classroom for three hours, eat lunch at 11:30, go back to class for three more hours, personal study time for one hour, dinner at 4:30, back to class for a couple of hours, gym for 45 minutes and finally lights out at 10:30.  If you couldn't tell the schedule is very overwhelming.

Most of the missionaries in the district are going to the same mission.

I think I am learning a lot.  I do feel the spirit helping me a lot.

The temple today was really good.

Elder Shirts

First email

I'm here and safe, there is a website called dear elder.com where you can email me any day and they print out the email and put it in the mailbox that day.My companion elder Young is really cool and i'm pretty sure his dad went to the same mission that dad did. It's pretty hard being away from home in a place I don't recognize and people I don't know but i'm doing better though. The good thing about this place is that the spirit is really here though. Another good thing is that all of the other elders in the same room have gotten along well really fast. I think I'm going to need you to explain to me how Dropbox works again. I still don't know where half of the stuff I packed are because I haven't fully unpacked yet since we don't really have any free time which is an ok thing because it means less time to worry about missing home. The teachers here seem like they treat anxiety as a bad thing and that if you have it than you don't have a testimony but I just keep telling myself that they don't understand and I keep moving forward not really worrying about it.

Everything is going good though I think that I'm gradually enjoying it more and more.