O Du Frohliche!

November 28, 2011

Servus y'all! Wie geht's eich? Yeah, so this week was pretty awesome. We began teaching Rene-Michael (Mike) Strassmair this week. He is really one of those people that you hope for on your mission. So meet Rene: He's a 48 year old Austrian man who was referred to us by his friend Klaus Haindl (one of the most active member missionaries in the world). Rene grew up in Florida and speaks really good English. He makes tons of jokes and likes to say stuff like "Dude" and "Dynamite". At one point in high school he had a desk mate who he really admired because he was so straight forward and honest. He just loved how good of a kid he was. It came out at some point that this kid was a Mormon. Rene kept that in the back of his head as he continued through life. Back in Austria he left the Roman Catholic church because he felt like it was too cold between the members. He went on the search for the true religion and converted to Islam. Shortly thereafter however, he left for the same reasons as before. He continued his search. One day he was invited to the Mormon church by his friend and "hausmeister" (like a landlord) Klaus. Rene took up the invitation and after seeing the primary program, he wanted to set up meetings with us (the missionaries) and said that he wants to be baptized. Now normally, we are pretty suspicious of anyone that comes up to us and says that they want to be baptized. This is a different case though. We began meeting with him this week and were surprised to find out that he is totally willing to meet as much as we want to during the week. With Klaus as our joint-teach, everything goes really well. Rene is scheduled to be baptized on the 10th of December. We will work really hard to reach this date for him. This week in church we also were surprised to receive a lady named Flor and her two sons Mario and Gabriel. This lady is the wife of a member but she is not baptized. Her husband doesn't come to church either, but she happened to ask Schw. Hager where the church was and came to two hours. She made out an appointment to meet with us this week and we hope that it will result in her becoming a member along with her son who is of age to be baptized and we hope that the father will also have interest in meeting with us. There's just all kinds of stuff going on right now in Linz.
The package was really cool. We really enjoyed the first of the four nacho cheese dips. There's something magical about nacho cheese because it doesn't exist at all in Austria, nor do tortilla chips really. With regards to transfers, they will be on the 29th of December (my year mark) so you have a little bit of time before you need to send it. If you are really afraid then just wait until after the transfer, but I don't really care when it gets here. But you know me, flexible as a V7-I resolution. You may need to ask your nearest music theory student to explain the inherent joke in that last comment.
By the way, the Best Two Years is a lot more comfortable than the living circumstances that we had with 4 Elders. Our sleeping room is about 6 ft wide and 13 ft deep. It also had two desks in it and some shelves. I don't know, it wasn't horrible.
A little request, if you could find a way of putting all of the songs from the two CDs of Thomas Hampson singing American folk songs on CDs and sending them to me, that would be cool. There are a lot of songs, so it may turn out to be something like 4 CDs. It's all on my iTunes and might even be in their own playlists.
Well, I think that's enough for this week. Handküsse zuhause. Tschüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüüß!