Carcassonne

Hello everybody!

It is my first preparation day here in Carcassonne. I was in Lyon for q few days for training, and now I am here in my first area. Carcassonne is amazing! The ward here is small but they try.

My French is slower than I would like but I can understand everybody just fine! I wish I had given more French discussions in the MTC though.

We walk a lot here, sometimes biking I've heard.

We have a zone conference from Wednesday to Friday this week so that should be fun. It will be the last conference for President and Sister Roney, unfortunately. But I'm still excited for it! It will be held in Aix-en-Provence, towards the east I believe. I am about an hour south-east of Toulouse here in Carcassonne.

I'm lucky to have a great father in Elder Garside. (for missionaries, their father is their trainer) we speak a lot of French and we have 5 progressing amis de l'eglise (investigators) with lots of other amis and LARCS (less-actives and recent converts) we hope to have 4 new engages (I can't find accents on this computer) between our amis J, A, and the P family.  Elder Garside is a great trainer and a very good French speaker.

AND ALL THE FRENCH PEOPLE CALL ME GENERAL MACARTHUR WHAT THE HECK. They all do the dorky salute and call me le general.

"The View from the Afternoon".  The name of one of my favorite songs and also a caption for one of the many apartment views we have. Our place is very nice. Our apt is huge by the way. A dinner room, kitchen, bathroom, our bedroom, and another room with a couch and closet space. I have a walk-in closet all to myself! Lots of pantry space, most importantly. Windows and the shutters open and close with the push of a button. We have a small balcony! So blessed.

So it turns out missionaries from USA going out of USA don't keep the iPads nor do they buy them. For right now, we use them for free and return them after the mission. That might change. Mine is brand new since the missionaries just got them so that's lucky.

Since pics are worth 1000 words, I'll save some time and send these:

Here are my teachers from the MTC, Brother Gardner and Sister Jensen, both on the far right of each rows.

This is a bathroom in Charles de Gaule aeroport in Paris. A really nice bathroom.

Here is my travel group to Lyon!

Greeted at Lyon airport by President & Sister Roney

Here is a selfie I took in Lyon while we were contacting! We gave them a liver de Mormon and the number for local missionaries and they said they would read and pray about it! So cool!

Pain au chocolat for breakfast. Mmmmmm

Cool Lyonnaise art!

Apartment view & kitchen

Sorry the emails are so piecemeal. If that’s a word anymore. For p-day we're going to this huge castle in Carcassonne, I'll have to send pictures next week but it looks incredible. Go Google "castle carcassonne france". It's very, very cool.