Week 58 - Lodz

How are you all doing this week?  Hope life is going well for you all.  Life is good over here.  This past week was another quick one.  We had a meeting with W., the recent convert, about family history on Thursday.  That went well.  We think it will be helpful for him.  We also had a Polish class with our investigator O.  It went well.  We didn't have a ton of time to talk, but he made it to church as usual yesterday.  We have a new plan in place that we're going to try where we will get him to read a chapter from the Book of Mormon before our Polish class every week, and then talk about it afterwards.  We feel pretty good about it, we're going to try it this week with 1 Nephi 13.  We'll see how it goes. 

The funniest experience from this week was probably on Friday.  We went caroling with the other elders, and we went to an apartment building and started knocking on doors.  Not a ton of people were interested in hearing carols, but there was this one lady who came out and talked with us briefly.  She found out we were from the States, and she proceeded to say every English word she knew how to say and list off every American she could think of.  It was kind of funny.  

We had our first big snow here this past week, so that's been pretty cool. Last Thursday, it literally snowed all day (meaning from 6:30 am to 10:30 pm), but unfortunately the ground was still pretty warm, so there was only about 2 inches on the ground. I hope it snows a lot though this year.  

It's pretty crazy that it's the Christmas season already.  As far as decorations go, we don't really have too many because I haven't gotten the package Mom sent yet.  Hopefully soon though.  

Just like last year, the church has the Christmas initiative of #LighttheWorld.  It's pretty cool, so you should all check it out.  It's cool that during the holiday season, we can focus on serving others and making their holidays a little brighter.  As we serve others, we learn more about the Savior.  I hope we'll all be able to make an effort to serve others during this holiday season.  Hope you are all doing well, and have a solid week!

-Elder Hadfield

just for fun, Elder Blau's report on the week:
Halo,

This past week has been pretty good. I guess the big news here is that the Christmas initiative has started and that it has snowed for real. The Christmas thing is Light the World. In Polish it is Świeć Światu. We have gotten a ton of ulotki (I don't know what to call them in English. Maybe cards or something) and we have been working on passing them out to get the word out. It is kind of fun handing them out because they are a lot smaller than the ones that we have for our English class. ...

One of the bad things about the card is that they are really hard to write on and we write our phone numbers on all of them. They also direct people to the mormon.org site in English so we have to write /pol on all of them. We made like a thousand of them in 2-3 hours. It should be good though. I like that they have a picture of Mary on the front though. Polish people love Mary. Like a cuss ton. It is harder to say no to her. 

Most of the stuff that we have done in the past couple of days has been about getting people onto the site. We handed out ulotki on Piotrkowska, talked to random people on the street, caroled in buildings, and caroled by one of the big malls. I enjoy caroling a lot because I get to play guitar. The buildings were fine to play in, but it was a little difficult playing near the mall because it was so cold. I wasn't able to feel my fingers that much and that makes it hard to move them. It was a ton of fun. I was just glad that I finally got to play outside and use my guitar as an asset. The Polish hymnbook has like 6 or 8 other Christmas songs that weren't translated and are more Polish, whatever that means. I have been working on learning how to play them a bit. The only one that I can do for sure right now is Dzisiaj w Betlejem. They are either really fast or really slow. 

Other than that this week, we started our fast by going to a Vietnamese place. It is called Good Morning Vietnam, and it was really good. The only problem was that it had a billion options to choose from. It was all in Polish, and I don't know most food description/cooking words. I just guess that it all would be pretty good and went with the easiest thing to say. It ended up working out for me. It only cost like twelve zlots too. Not too bad. It would have been enough, but we were about to fast so we went to a Biedronka and got some pierniki. They are kind of like pretzels with chocolate, but way different. They are quite good though. I feel as though they bring happiness to my life. 

The Poles are planning a giant Christmas party. It is a pretty big holiday here. They are planning to do it on Christmas Eve. It is called like Wigilia or something. I guess that all of the less active members come because there is food. It should be a rocking time.

It has already started to snow. There was one day where it snowed from the time that we woke up to the time that we went to sleep. It was really interesting mostly because there was only like 2 inches on the ground by the end of it. I guess that the ground was still too warm. It is pretty cold as well. Our fingers start to freeze a little if we don't cover them. We also don't cover them much because we can't hand out flyers for English class with gloves on very well. I am going to buy some gloves with the fingers cut out so I don't die.