Hey again!
It sounds like you guys had a pretty lively week back at home! Glad to hear that the school year's all wrapped up and you guys are ready for a good summer. :) I'm super excited for it, aside from the heat that's already starting to come in...
So, here I am in Lorient! After over 6 hours on trains, and a couple hours of waiting in between, I finally made it here Wednesday evening. It was a pretty eventful transfer day:
The morning started off pretty calmly, as you can see from some of the photos that I got with Elder Perry. After a really late Tuesday night of packing and both of us deciding to make one last batch of brownies as I packed, we didn't get much sleep. We had a train to catch around 7:30 that morning. So, to be sure we caught it, we had to set the alarm at 4:30 to go turn on our stove to heat up our water, then wake up at 5 to start showering and all that. We wanted to be really sure we wouldn't miss the train. Turned out that we still had enough time after all that to take some final pictures and buy some baguettes for the ride. (Final Calais and Transfer Photos Below)
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Elder Perry on Transfer Day Helping
with Adam's Lugga |
Elder Perry gave me a "couronne" as we were leaving, one of those seashell necklace things. It's super beautiful, and probably my favorite souvenir so far. Random tangent there, I really loved serving with him. Like you guys got to see on Skype, he's just hilarious, and we had so much fun together. I miss him already. :,)
So, as we got going, our TGV stopped in Lille and a couple going on vacation to Jerusalem got on sitting across from us. So, Elder Perry and I had one last chance to share the Gospel together. :) Once we finally got to Paris, Elder Perry and I had to quickly say goodbye as his new companion came and I had to run (literally) to catch my train on the other side of Paris. Didn't actually end up catching it, but I got about 5,000 weird looks running through the metro with two other missionaries and my suitcases. :) I'm kind of going into a lot of detail here so you can see how crazy and fun and exciting transfer days can be. Once I got to the Montparnasse gare, I was able to see Elder Evans and Elder Perez at the same time! Elder Evans was super excited to see me, and the same for me. He hasn't changed, still the same guy I loved serving with. :) We got to talk for a few minutes before he had to leave. Then I got to talk to Elder Perez, where I had one of the most natural and smooth French conversations I've probably ever had. It just flowed so nicely, I was amazed. He's still super goofy and awesome. :) After all that craziness, I had a 2 hour train ride by myself (it happens sometimes) to Rennes, where I waited around a while before Elder Humphrey showed up. Super sweet guy, I'll get to that more later. And then, finally, after all of that, we caught a train back to Lorient with the Quimper elders. By that point, it was pretty much the end of the day. Whew!
As you can guess, Thursday, we hit the pavement. Elder Humphrey and I are both kind of at the same "ready to take the mission to the next level" sort of stage, and we've got some really good goals for this transfer.
As we taught our amis from Madagascar on Friday night (I think you call that Malagash or something like that), I really felt the spirit working through me. Yeah, of course, we try to be like that all the time as missionaries, and hopefully we are to some extent or another. But that night, I really felt it. I good feel the knowledge that I had gained being used to answer the questions they had, and in ways that I had never thought of before. I was able to listen patiently and truly feel love for these people.
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| Random Tahitian Guy? |
Beyond that, kind of a regular end to the week. The branch is super great, and actually bigger in number of active members than the "ward" in Calais, so that's cool. :)
And I'll have to explain my picture with the random Tahitian guy a little later. :)
Thanks for everything and for the birthday wishes! It should be a pretty good one. :)
Elder Bigler
France-ism:
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