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1st P-day in Italy |
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Well hello there Journal, long time no write!
Wednesday Dec 22 1999 - 1st P-Day in the field.
Wow this week has seemed like a month! Our plane couldn't land in Venice because the Venice airport was having a strike, instead we went to Treviso, where luckily the mission president found us.
We met Pres. Curtis and his wife Sis. Curtis, who are both awesome people. We stayed at the mission home tuesday and then spent the night in a Hotel tuesday night. We ate Pizza (Italian style) for dinner. It's different than the American style in that the crust is super thin. They have interesting toppings too, my favorite was the over easy egg topping: BLECH! They had the conventional toppings too.
Wednesday we went back to the mission home and got all sorts of orientation and mission rules lessons. Wednesday evening we went out into Padova to a Palazzio and did some street contacting. Which was an experience because it was raining and cold and we were jet lagging and we couldn't understand the language very well.
My temp. comp. was Elder DeFillipo who is a native Italian, but spend like 8 years in the U.S. so speaks the (English) language quite well. I couldn't even tell he was Italian at first.
We had some good contacts and gave out like 4 books and set up like 3 appts. Then I split w/ Anz. Nebeker and we went and looked in the Cathedral which was beautiful.
Here's a list of the Anziani that I remember worked in the office:
1. Anz. Anderson
2. Anz. Gessel
3. Anz. DeFillipo
4. Anz. Seamens
and some others. They were all good guys.
We ate real Italian Lasagna that night. The next morning they put us on trains and I came to my first city: Ancona. It's strange because Anz. Ditto got sent to the same city and now we live in the same apartment, which I imagine probably never happens.
Ancona is an awesome city. It reminds me of San Francisco. Foggy, trams, the coast, the wind, the hills, all the apartment buildings...it's great! There's always huge ships at the dock. There's a huge Duomo that overlooks the port from a giant cliff. It's an amazing city.
We have bus passes. Something that sucks is that our apartment is at the top of a huge hill and the bus stop is at the bottom. It's especially hard to traverse when you are carrying huge travel bags or a large amount of groceries. But it's good exercise I suppose.
My first companion in the field is named Anz. Greg Perry. He's an absolutely cool guy. We get along great. I'm his first junior companion so we are definitely learning together. He's taught me how to cook some good Italian food on a budget. (He's from Seattle Washington)
We always eat a huge lunch (usually pasta) and just snack for dinner and breakfast. Therefore I may be losing some weight here with all the walking we do.
Our apartment is awesome: It's huge. A big dining/living room. A kitchen. A laundry drying room, 2 bathrooms, and 2 huge bedrooms. All the floors are marble and we hae some nice big windows with a porch that overlooks the city. I like it a lot. They say it's one of the nicest in the mission.
There's a lot of work to do here. This sunday there were approx 10 people in church. That's including 4 anziani. There's about 3-4 active members and the rest were investigators. We've got out work cut out for us.
But we have had some very good experiences: But I'll write them another day. I'm tired now: *Remember Domenico and Carolina |
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