Dear Family,
So the other day I was thinking about how fast time is flying by, just in general, not even only here on the mission. I was thinking about how recent high school felt, how fast that one year of college was and the thought that it would be a while before I would be on the mission, however, that's all wrong... time goes by far too quickly. To make things even worse, my mission is already about one third over! I can't even begin to believe that. At the end of this transfer, I will have been on the mission for eight months. That right there is ridiculous. I might cry. Anyway... on to what I wanted to talk about today.
So, a few days ago, we were sitting in companionship study, and we were talking about something, and I started being ridiculous because I thought it was funny, and Elder Kreitzer kept playing along with it, but really it was bothering him and we've talked about doing that before. At one point I was acting like an atheist and he was trying to tell me that there were people in the book, and I said that there's no way that people could be in a book, there's only words there. So he opened up the book and pointed to the name "Alma" and I said, that's not a person, that's the name of a person and he's probably in the ground somewhere. Anyway, Elder Kreitzer got so frustrated with me and I had no idea because he would just put on a face and play along with it, that he grabbed my legs and pulled me around the room. I didn't really care so I just went limp and let him do what he wanted. Turns out that he ended up dragging me all around the house basically, and then into the bedroom where he commenced to try putting me on the bed so that he could leave me there. I'm not sure what his intentions where but he soon found out that I weigh a lot more than he thinks. So that was a pretty good companionship inventory, and we ended up talking about it later, because other things happened, and we started finding each others buttons. So, that night, we came back to the house, and I could see that there was a definite need to talk. So I had each of us say ten good things about the other and then two new things that we haven't said before, that we can work on. We ended up saying the ten things pretty easily, but the two were hard. We found out that we like each other a lot more than we thought we did, and there's much less that we need to work on than it sometimes seems. We both came out of that time feeling much better, and right now we're trying to find some way to keep those good feelings.
Then yesterday, we called a potential investigator to set up a meeting. Elder Kreitzer and McGowan found her; she's really cool and she speaks perfect English. So Kreitzer called her yesterday and set up a meeting with her on Thursday next week, but she also told us that there's a festival going on the next day (today) at the castle in Lipnik, and that was one of the ones that we wanted to go see really badly. So we decided that it'd be a good investment of our time to go. So we got all of our times figured out and we did our grocery shopping really fast in the morning today (15 minutes - which, by the way, is ridiculous) and then we ran to the train station so that we could get our train. Turns out that we had a really easy time getting there and then we found out that the castle was in the next town over. It's not like it was a really far way away, so we decided to go and take a bus there, but when we got to the bus station, it was already gone (by two minutes) and the next one wouldn't be coming for another hour. So we decided to walk, but we got sorely lost. It was only 5 kilometers away, how could we get lost? I'll tell you: because we didn't have a map and European cities are really crazy and ridiculous. So we asked one lady how to get there, and she said, "Oh you're going the complete wrong way, you need to go back down this way and" so on and so forth. So we did and we kept following the road came to a gas station. From there we could see the castle up on the mountain from where we were, but it was still quite a long way off. However, again, we didn't know which way we needed to go, so we asked a police officer, and he said that he was from Olomouc and didn't know his way around there too much and had never been there before, but advised us to go back down into town to buy a map. So we started heading down back toward town, and we saw a road that looked promising so we went down it and came across a few people and asked them where we needed to go, and they told us to follow the road we were on back a little way and then take this little mud trail thing through someone's field and then follow the road up to the bridge and then cross it and then follow the road up to the castle. What?! So, once we were past the field, it looked like we were in someone's private property, but there was a lady there, so we asked her where we needed to go, and she told us that we were almost to the road that led up to the bridge. Long story short, we got there but almost two hours after we left the train station. However, it was worth it. It was nothing short of amazing. I wouldn't be surprised if people were working year round to get this festival ready and the way that it is. They were having shows of medieval fightings and stuff, and I got a whole bunch of fun videos. I'll probably send a sim card home soon so you guys can see them. I think that I got about two good ones of full out battles between all the actors. It was way sweet.
Anyway, if only every výlet could be that awesome. It was quite an adventure, getting lost and all, but it was a lot of fun too. I think that we need to take life the same way. It's a big long journey, and we can stop and ask for directions all along the way, but the directions that we get from our Heavenly Father are perfect, and only our idiocy and lack of following the directions perfectly takes us astray, but with that getting lost, we need to remember that we need to have fun. I think that is something that I'm really learning out here: have fun no matter the worries and the frustrations.
I love you all very much and I hope that you can love to laugh at the hard times.
Starší Monk