Five weeks to go

Yesterday I had the wonderful pleasure of visiting my cousin, who recently returned from serving, with her husband, a mission in Holland. They reported their experiences in sacrament meeting in their ward, along with their son, who just returned from serving in Washington State. After the meeting, we all gathered at their home and I had nice visit with her and really learned about some of the details of work in Europe. Besides the financial, practical, cultural and political details, the main value of the experience was that I could really feel the great and wonderful blessing of serving the Lord among the people there. It made the mission seem that much closer and real.

Also over the weekend (Friday, really) we contacted a coordinator at the MTC concerning language training. Since we are only in the MTC for 7 days, there will only be minimal experience in learning German there. We are to set up some Skype-based language instruction for the next weeks and then after Christmas we hope to have some days at the MTC in immersion experiences in the language before officially entering the MTC.

Exactly 5 weeks until then!

Travel information

We received our travel information today. We are to fly to Paris, leaving our fair state on Jan 7th at 4:55 PM (Delta) arriving in Paris the next morning at 11:25 AM (10 1/2 hours of actual flight), then after a layover of about 1 and a half hours, on to Munich, arriving Tuesday mid-afternoon.

Preparations

I have avoided making posts for a while. We have been busy with mission preparations. My companion and I love spending a little time each morning reading from the Book of Mormon, auf Deutsch. I read a verse in English, she in German and then I repeat it in German.

I have been working on studying the region and making maps. They are fairly large files so I will not post them here, though I am adding an image of the map they sent us, reduced in size. You won't be able to read the names, but you can get the idea. In researching the wards and branches of the mission, I  came up with a count of 36 Wards and 23 Branches. Liechtenstein has none, but there is a ward near there in Dornbirn, Austria.

We are now working on buying things (luggage, clothes, etc.) and studying the language. We will not be able to use our cell phones over there, so we will probably discontinue our account and cell phones here, so contact will mainly be done via email and Skype. We will likely be discontinuing our home phone here as well. The boys will be setting up something for their internet and will set up their own phones, I believe.

This is all very exciting and overwhelming as well. With the Lord's help we can do this.

November birthdays

We got together, as is the tradition. Of course, we are not all here, with the Singing Bees in Europe. Here are a few pictures.

Isaak's birthday

We visited Isaak's grave. It was on Monday instead of Sunday, because it got dark before we were able to get there on the 18th. Here are some pictures.

and the opening...

Well, we have officially opened the plain white envelope and here is the result:

We are called to serve in the  Alpine-German speaking       Mission, departing 31 Dec 2012     .


We are all excited and visiting together about this so I will post thoughts and reactions in the next blog.

Wow

First of two posts - "Anticipation"

Well, the long anticipated day has arrived. We received a large white envelope in the mail this afternoon, at 4:15 PM, actually. We have invited our family members to convene at our house for the official opening at 5:15 PM (Mountain time). The results will be reported in the next blog.