Grateful for American Healthcare and Air Conditioning!

Update from June 23, 2013
1) How is your new companion? My new companion is great. We get along awesome so far. We are like the same, we hate the same foods, like the same foods, like the same music, hate the same music. So it's good. I'll tell you a funny story about him further down.

2) Do you like being a trainer? Being a trainer is pretty cool. It's made me realize how much I've actually learned out here, and how freaking fast time flies. I was in the MTC almost a year ago, and my new comp just barely got here. Weird. He speaks the language pretty well because he has a background with some Spanish, so he understands the grammar and stuff. But he still needs a lot of help. he's pretty fearless though and doesn't mind me correcting his Romanian.
3) Anything new with Florin...is he making any progress? We haven't heard from Florin at all. Which is unfortunate. He was supposed to go to EFY in Germany, but backed out because his mom changed her mind. Still trying to touch base with him though.

This week was, man, HOT. Holy cow. we hit 98 degrees with 56% humidity. I'm on two showers a day, and sometimes a head dunk in cold water at lunch time. We just sweat and sweat. I miss the cold. And snow. I'll take the cold over the hot any day of the week. We only taught one lesson this week, and it was just this crazy old guy who has been investigating the church for like 10 years. We went to his house and he tried to feed us fish, but we can't eat the fish here because it will make us sick, so that was kinda awkward. We just ate the mountains of rice and potatoes he gave us. haha. The fish was actually from Vietnam, and from a good grocery store. So we called the mission president's wife about it, and she said that she would never eat fish from Vietnam, but it would probably be safe. We ended up not eating it. This week, we had a few meetings with other missionaries in our zone. They actually did our zone training meeting here in Timisoara this time, instead of in Arad where they usually do it. So that was good we didn't have to get up super early to catch trains and stuff. and other than that, we've been contacting when the sun goes behind buildings and there's some shade.

So, cool story about my companion. Him and one of the elders from his MTC group, who is also serving here did some contacting together the other day. We were in Centru, and sitting on this wall. There were these 2 girls sitting across the way from us and one of them waved an Elder R. He then proceeds to semi-yell "ce faceti voi" like how are you? to them. They say good, and he's just standing there, petrified. Elder Green (the other elder training here) and I told them to go talk to them. So after standing there a minute, looking quite confused, they went over. We watched our "sons" from afar for about an hour as we handed out English cards. Turns out they were 2 Pentecostal girls. We actually ran into them again today, too funny. The 2 new missionaries carried on a (probably a bit broken) conversation for over an hour. We were proud of them.

So we went to a Romanian Hospital this week as well. We went with the branch president to give a member there a blessing. It was super hot in the room, the place doesn't have a/c. Man I tell you what, healthcare is not like in America that's for sure. We gave her the blessing, my comp did the annointing and I sealed and gave the blessing. She was super thankful, and actually made it to church on Sunday as well.

We were contacting and took a break for a bit one of the days, we went and bought a loaf of bread for 2 lei, and ended up feeding the entire thing to the pigeons. We caught a few as well, that was fun. That's about it for the week.

Feeding the pigeons

Oh yeah, I made root beer with that stuff you sent me, it tasted a little funny. Come to find out, it's root beer concentrate, not extract, so you have to make it different. That's what i get for not reading the directions I suppose. I'm gonna try again this week sometime.

We have zone conference this week in Arad, so that should be fun. Zone conferences are always interesting, sometimes long, but interesting and I try to learn from them too.

Thanks for the package once again. I only have the cake left. Ate everything else already. The only reason I still have the cake is because we didn't have any eggs. It'll be gone this week i'm sure

Be safe, happy, and faithful,
love,
Elder Phelps


Cool Sunset on the river