Summer Feelings...

This last week was pretty good. Honestly a little slow, but it was still a good week. It actually warmed up to around 25 degrees which to us feels like summer. I'm actually not even kidding haha. We packed up our winter coats and all our thermals and we are going around in our summer shoes and wearing our fall jackets. It's pretty nice to not have to wear a huge coat anymore. It's a weird feeling though, it feels like when I first got in the country last year. It's crazy to think that's only a month away. Next week is gonna be pretty dope though. All the missionaries are going to the Kazakh Eagle Festival. These Kazakh dudes ride in on their horses with their eagles and have competitions with each other to see who has the best bird. So we will get to see some pretty dope genuine eagle hunting. I'm pretty stoked about it. 

So last week we helped Cox teach Batbagan, the 14 year old boy in my old area. Cox needs to bring another set of missionaries or another guy to the lesson because his mom is there, so he just has us come with him. It's pretty nice to still be able to teach Batbagan, he's a super cool kid. And during the lesson he was asking some pretty deep questions that I would never have thought about at 14. He's a real good kid, I'm excited to see what happens to him. 

Grandma Pujee also invited us over for dinner last week. She is the lady who is learning English and taught us about time management. So we go into her house and I was blown away. She had an American style apartment and it was super strange to be in. She had a dining room and a bed room and a kitchen. It was crazy to me. And she cooked some super super good food and I was just blown away the whole time. It didn't even feel like Mongolia and it was super strange to me. Makes me wonder what it will be like going back to the States. The meeting was really good though, she showed some Mormon messages and they were all in English so we actually understood them 100% haha. It was a nice to be able to understand. 

My companion went on a zone leader split on Saturday, so I was with Elder Quakenbush for the day. We heard about this super cheap pant sale going on, so we went up to the mall the sale was at and just started looking around. Then within like 5 minutes 6 other missionaries show up here looking for some pants too haha. So we went around with them for the day doing some errands. Ended up taking the back roads through the abandoned part of the city which was pretty funny. It felt like how I imagine Chernobyl would feel. Huge Russian buildings and not a person living in them. After all this though, Quakenbush and I taught a lesson to the family that I am teaching. The moms name is Zagasuren. It was a good lesson. We actually made it though 2 of the discussions with them. They are really prepared for all of this and are really trying their hardest to do what we teach. They read the Book of Mormon like crazy which is interesting, that's something I didn't figure out for a long time. They are getting baptize in March, I think it's the 9th. 

On Sunday we had some pretty cool stuff happen. This 15 year old girl came up to us and said that she used to be an investigator 2 years ago, but stopped going to church, and now she wants to go through with everything and get baptized. It was pretty crazy to have this happen. So we are going to meet with her and really go through everything, and try to figure out what happened and why she wants to suddenly get baptized. But it's pretty sweet. Then we had a member bring her friend to church, and he is pretty interested, so we are going to meet with him this week too. And those 2 boys that my companion taught are supposedly going to get the permission form from their mom to be baptized, so that might happen on Saturday. Fingers crossed. They have been coming to church every week for 9 years. And I asked the young men's leader about starting up a mutual and he said that he can't teach it because he works, so I offered to have us teach and he was stoked to hear that we want to do that. So we are starting that up this week too, its going to be combined with the neighboring ward which Teasdale is in funny enough. Hopefully it goes well, it can really help the youth here stay active and find friends. 

English teaching starts up on Friday for me which I'm super stoked about. I'm pretty sure I teach a class of medical students. Kinda weird with the warm weather, it feels like summer break haha. But school just started up again. I'm pretty happy for it though, we get free lunch and it's something to keep us busy. 

And finally, last night we met with this super sweet old lady in our ward. She invited us over all on her own and it was super sweet of her. We went to her little apartment and went through her photo albums. They were sweet. She has some really cool pictures of old Mongolia and the countryside. It really made me long for the countryside. It looked so beautiful and gorgeous. So when we come back we gotta go camping here. 

And yeah that's it, not too much going on. Love ya guys

Austin

Walking through the abandoned area of the city.  

 Sunday dinner.  I made 13 kg of cheesy potatoes.  I had to hand grade them and squeeze all of the water out of them.  No frozen hash browns in this country.  They were so good. 

My new companion. Elder Lichtenberg.  This was the in the apartment building of the lady that invited us over for dinner. 

 Dinner at the French restaurant.  We didn't notice the picture above my head until after the fact.  Mom fix that please. 

 Gotta love cheap Chinese knock-offs. 

 This is a mural by my new apartment.  It says, "Follow your day dreams."

 This guy is fixing the cable connections on top of the bus.  They fall off all the time. The driver just stops the bus, climbs up and fixes it.  Right before I took this picture he tried to reconnect it and massive sparks starting flying. 

Just walking the city. 

 First warm sunshine in months.  It felt so good. 

This is the view from the store that we went to looking for pants.  See the little green dot that is to the left of the ger? If you zoom in you can tell that there is a man there with his big green bag.  The homeless people walk around town and go through the garbages to find things to recycle. The entire massive bag will get them the equivalent of 7/10 of an american dollar.  

 District meeting. 

Cute little elephant graffiti. 

Messing around in the abandoned area.

Enjoying the warm sunlight.  I can't even tell you how good it felt. 

Just thought I'd show you how my washing machine works.  We fill it up with a hose.  It just swishes the clothes around, doesn't work that great but its better than nothing.  We don't have a dryer, so our apartment is covered in wet clothes a lot.