City Bum...

So this week I moved out of my old apartment into a new one in a new area. It was weird, leaving my old apartment felt like leaving my college dorm. A little bit of home will be in that apartment, spending 7 months in there was pretty dang fun. My new area is completely in the city. It's also the smallest ward boundary in the whole country, so the ward is pretty dang small. The new apartment is pretty nice though. I sleep in what is normally the closet, but old missionaries pushed a bed in there to try and make a little more room in the bed room. It's pretty dope, it's like I have my own little space in there. I also bought a little humidifier, and printed some pictures off and taped them up, so it's like my own tiny bedroom inside a closet haha. I like it though. As for this week, not much happened, but we did get a few meetings with people in.

Before I left Sukhbaatar, I went on a Zone Leader Split with Scrimsher. It was pretty dang fun going around all day with him. We met with Altansukh one last time before I left the ward. His son and daughter in law are in town from Riverton funny enough. It was really cool to get a perspective on America from a Mongolian with perfect english lol. While we were together we went to our ward's mutual too. No one showed up for a while, so we got some really nice ping pong balls and had way too much fun playing ping pong with each other. It was a really fun time.

This week a huge group of Mongolians came into the mission too. I know a good portion of them from church and seeing them around the activities the church hosts. It was cool to see them now as missionaries and everything. Kinda funny to me and it brought me back to when I first started my mission. But it is really cool to see these kids from here, most of who's families aren't members, out serving missions. It still blows me away that even though the church is so small out here, people are still going on missions and teaching people and giving up their own time to do this. It really goes to show that the church is true everywhere, even people from a little village in Mongolia can know that. 

So in my new area we really only have 2 people we teach. They are brothers and they were taught all the lessons a long time ago, they just have been waiting for their mom to let them get baptized, they have been waiting for about 9 years, hopefully we can get them baptized quick. We also teach this family in the other ward that borders us. It's easier for us to teach because they live literally 5 minutes away haha. They are super cool though. It's a family of a mom and her two sons. One is 19 and reminds me of Jacob. And the other is 14. They are super cool people and should be getting baptized in March pretty soon. 

So Sunday was probably the best day of my mission. So first we went to church and our ward is tiny. About 25 people came, but they are all super super nice and really went out of their way to get to know me. But before church, a member wanted to meet us to practice some English. She is doing BYU Idaho online classes and part of her classes was to teach us about Time Management (relax mom I know you are probably on cloud 9 that someone taught me this). Turns out it is the same grandma that we met with in the MTC! She is super nice and honestly reminds me of Grandma Marsha. At the end of her teaching us this (all in english) she asked if we had any questions and I said "how do I manage my time better?" And she said "this is me speaking as an old experienced lady, this isn't what the class taught me. But you need to do some searching and find out what you what to become. Find out what's most important and then create small goals to help you reach other goals that will eventually lead to becoming the person you envisioned. I really butchered that, but it really hit me. So then we had sacrament and everything, and I walk out of the room after the meeting is over to go to our next class and you'll never guess who I see. Batbileg. Yeah, the guy who Garcia and I baptized last year. He is still coming to church and he saw me and was stoked to see me. It was fun catching up with him. He is still dating that RM and they are planning to get married pretty soon. They looked so happy and so cute together. So yeah, seeing him at church was awesome It was honestly the most happy I've felt in a long time. Then after church we had dinner at Cox's (my old apartment and area) and I ran into Sister Wells. I passed her some people I used to teach in Sukhbaatar, including Bolorzaya. She told me they met with Bolorzaya and she came to church and is going to get baptized on March 23rd. I guess that Bolorzaya has been reading the Book of Mormon like crazy and has been praying like nuts. It was awesome to hear that she is this solid in the gospel already. And Sister Wells also told me that she met with Myadag this week. I guess Myadag is doing a lot better and had a really cool experience with prayer and how it helped her feel peace during stressful times at college. So she is doing great. It just really made me feel happiness. It's tough out here sometimes when you can't really see the purpose of why you are here, or what the point behind all this is, and you see no real tangible results of all your efforts. But seeing all this on Sunday really made me see the purpose behind it all and caused me to feel just true raw happiness. I dunno, can't really explain it. But I'm sure Dad knows what I'm talking about and can maybe explain better. 

Also just a cool thing. If you look in your Come, Follow Me handbooks on the first part of January, the responsible for our own learning page. The picture of the girl that looks pretty Hawaiian, and it's all green, is actually not Hawaii. It's Mongolia. And those white things in the background are ger's. That picture was taken at a place called Terelj. So yeah, Mongolia is on the come up. 

And finally I got some dope glasses yesterday haha. So everyone here wears the 70's ish style glasses so I bought me a pair haha. They put in lenses with my perscription for 10 dollars. Love this place. 

And that's really all. Love ya guys

Austin

 I fell asleep and Cox decided to join in.  Like my 70's style glasses?

Dinner at my old apartment.  We were making sloppy jo's 

 My new apartment. 

 A sign representing my new area. 

 This was taken out my new bedroom window. Notice the haze and pollution. 

 Inside the national wrestling area.  This is where they hold the national championships.