After Christmas

Well, Christmas is over.

On the interesting side, Italians tend to drag out holidays longer than necessary. There was a holiday the day after Christmas, that also makes proselyting impossible. This week, we have Capo d'Anno, which is New Years. All the missionaries stay inside and do a deep cleaning of the apartment.

As far as the Skype call...yeah...the technical difficulties kind of stunk. Sometimes the headphones would mute what you guys were saying. I think what I might try next time, is to do two separate shorter calls, one to Utah, and one to Seattle.

Yesterday was dubbed  a "missionary work sunday", so all three hours of church were centered on missionary work. They asked if I would give a talk in church, and it was actually pretty fun. I had prepared some things, and then as I was up there, the Spirit was prompting me to say some other things. It's cool to think about the progress I have made as a missionary, where at the beginning it was hard to even bear a simple testimony in Italian, and now giving a talk in Italian is probably easier than in English. (Words in Italian are longer...so less words still equal more time, even when you talk fast).

Some members of the ward talked to me, and want to work with us, so I guess it worked. One woman was talking to me, and said, "Something that really stuck out to me, and that I really appreciate is that you became instant friends with us South Americans in the ward, because sometimes missionaries don't reach out to us." I made a really really really big effort to get to know people, so hopefully it is paying off.

We haven't been able to see many of our investigators this week because of the holidays. Until about the 7th of January, a lot of people are out of town. Luckily this gives us time to make mistakes, or learn about the transportation here. It was actually pretty hilarious, because yesterday we got on a bus that we thought would take us to where we needed to go...and then we ended up in a forest. Luckily, the bus eventually turned around, and we were able to get to our destination. :D

OH! I forgot! For Christmas we were able to watch two normal movies (with certain boundaries). We watched The Best Two Years (hahahaha), and Monsters University.