Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

We do get the Ensign, but it's the Liahona, and it's in Romanian
usually.  But that's OK.  I can understand a whole lot of written
Romanian when I read it.  It feels awesome to understand and speak a
different language.  But, of course, you learn a little bit every day.

Me at the Hobbit

Christmas was great, we watched the Hobbit,(our Mission President is a Lord of the Rings fan!) which was good as well. And the food was good (He had lasagna and Italian cake).  We are watching the Emperor's New Groove for our other movie and staying up till midnight.

(We got to Skype with Austin on Christmas Day for 2 1/2 hours, which meant we had to become Skype literate, LOL!  He was at a member's home--pictured below. It was awesome to see him and talk with him!  He looks and sounds good.  He told us he likes the European clothing styles much better than American---skinny suits and pointed shoes, funny!  He has had his suits, pants and shirts tailored to be quite fitted.)

Me and my companion on Christmas at a member's home

We went shopping today at the market, we bought 2 kilos potatoes, 1
kilo tomatoes, 1 kilo onions, some peppers, and a ton of parsley for
less than 30 lei.  Produce is so cheap here.  We are making salsa for
the new year tonight.  Hopefully it will be good.

I had an exchange with our district leader here Oradea the other day.
 He was recently one of the assistants to the president
for the mission and he's an awesome missionary.  He goes home in
February but he's still going strong and he's a great example.  We did
a ton of contacting and started making handouts for a scripture study
class (the bible) that we want to start up in the city.  Hopefully we
can get some people to come.  As for the contacting, we went block
knocking basically.  We knocked on a ton of doors, but no lessons.
Had to have been over 40.  We did give out a few book of Mormons and
some pamphlets.

We ran into this old Roman Catholic lady, and she
told us to come in, and we said we had to leave, but she said, "no,
you're coming in and getting some food." she gave us cozonac, I don't
know how to explain it.  It's like cake bread, tastes nasty.  But she
loved us and the pass along card we gave here.  So after we stood in
her house, we said a prayer for her, then she pooped us ( the kiss on
each cheek thing) and did the cross on us (kind of awkward) and said
God bless you and we left.  Wonderful lady.

We talked to another guy in the same staircase, we actually talked to him in the staircase, for
like 20 minutes.  He said that nobody really knows the truth about
God, he was interesting.  We got his number though.  Then we had a dry
spell.  Until we had a funny experience to end the night.  We knocked
on this door.  A guy answered and I asked him if he was religious.  He
said, "no, communist."  What?? weird answer for the question I asked.
We found out that he knew who we were and lived in Salt Lake for 20
years.  He spoke English, but spoke Romanian to us.  He said," There's
a ton of Mormons in Salt Lake, do you guys know that city?"  And we
said yes, we were both from Utah.  He wasn't interested, then closed
the door on us.  Not very many people want to listen here.  oh well.
That's basically the week.  Not super productive, but we talked to a
lot of people.  We still haven't taught a lesson this entire transfer,
so hopefully we can change that in the next few weeks.

My Romanian is Getting Better!

Elder Phelps is doing well.  He had a little frustration with the post office in trying to send a package home and said, "It takes forever to do things in this country."  Other than that, it seems like things are going well.  We are looking forward to Skype with him on Christmas Day!  He didn't attach any photos to this week's e-mail.
Here's the latest:

So this week was good. We were in Arad for the Christmas Zone
conference/party. So 2 hour trip on the train both ways, but it was
fun. All the missionaries from Oradea, Arad, Timisoara, Cluj, Deva,
and Sibiu were there. We watched the year end slideshow, ate a ton of
food and relaxed and talked with each other.

After we got home, we had a couple cool experiences. We were
finishing up a day of english contacting and putting up posters for
english when we went into a book store close to the gara here in
Oradea. The owner asked us if we were German, and we said no,
American. He told us we speak Romanian very well, and then asked us
what we were doing here. Love it when people say that, because it's
an immediate in to tell them about the Church. So we explained that
we are missionaries and we are teaching people in Romania. We gave
him and his wife a Book of Mormon and some pamphlets. Cool
experience.

Similar to the experience above, we were out English contacting a
different day, and we saw some ties in a store window so we went in.
We were looking at the ties and the guy at the counter said we speak
good Romanian, and that my companion has a better accent than I
do.... Oh well. Anyways, he guessed that we were missionaries and
then him, the owner of the store, and another girl working there, we
all got talking about religion. The girl there actually read
Moroni's promise out loud for everyone. And they took the Book of
Mormon and some pamphlets. It was cool, and I went to buy a tie,
which cost 20 lei, I only had 15 in my wallet, and the owner saw that
I was 5 lei short, and said "ahh, just take it, 15 lei is fine." So,
I got a tie for 5 lei off, and we basically gave a restoration lesson
to the 3 people in the store. Cool experience.

The Church is True, It's Cold in Romania Right Now, and Being a Missionary is Awesome!

It sounds like Austin is doing great being a missionary in Romania!  Here's the latest update from Elder Phelps:

 Our Christmas tree! (that has been up since I arrived in Oradea in September..... It's Christmas all the time at our house)

The trip to Bucharest was awesome. I got to see all my buddies from the MTC. It was super cold while we were there. We went to one of the malls there, and It's huge. It has a bowling alley, theater with an IMAX dome, tons of stores, food, ice skating rink, and just everything. Also we went to a few of the piatas (like the silk market in china) and got a few ties, I also bought a scarf. Those things are awesome and super warm. It was fun to see everyone there.  My companion is super cool. He's from Oregon most recently, his family moves around a lot. We have been getting along just great so far.

It snowed here on Saturday, and basically, it's freezing cold. It's different cold than in Utah. So we've been bundled up the last few days. We were in the park with our table and such in the snow, and the cops came up and asked us if we had permission to be there, and I took out the paper. They took all our our IDs and wrote stuff down, but we all checked out and they said to come find them if we ever had any problems. We got talking about religion and they didn't take any Books of Mormon, but they put one in the glove box of the police car! that was kind of funny. The guy said he never reads, so he said to give it to someone else who would, but we insisted he keep it, so he just put it in there. Funny.

 Snowing! at night from our kitchen window

Another funny thing, they don't have Dr. Pepper here. So I jumped on the Coke and Pepsi bandwagon and now I have acquired the taste. They have Mtn. Dew, but it tastes funny. Mostly I drink Coke, Sprite, and some other fruity flavored sodas they have here. I do drink a lot of water too, so don't worry about that.

(His mom finally gives up Coke and he jumps on that wagon --- that's not helpful for keeping me on the wagon! haha!)

Our power went out in our block last night, that was funny, we were in the dark a few hours before bed. Must've had something to do with the snow storm. There's quite a bit of it here. It's funny, none of their snowplows here are the same, all different. And they have people that shovel the snow in all the public areas, same people that rake up the leaves everywhere. Good thing to give people jobs I guess.

My other companion left me and went to Alexandria. So now I'm like the person who knows the city the best out of the 4 of us here. I can speak well enough now too, to get by by myself. My new companion is super good at the language, even though he's only a transfer ahead of me, so I hope to learn a lot from him too. I understand probably 80 percent of what I hear. It's mostly just vocab now. I understand all the prepositions and sounds that refer to different cases of the language. I carry around a little notebook and write words down that I don't know and look them up later.

The work is slow, we contact a lot, focus on street boarding in the park, and obviously english. Either way, we are always busy with something, between studying, contacting, serving at Caritas, or doing stuff with the government (like today, we had to get our permission to put up posters around the city.

Life's good, the Church is true, it's cold in Romania right now and being a missionary is awesome!

Staying in Oradea for Another 6 Weeks

Today's e-mail chided us for not sending an e-mail to Austin this week.  I did send one, but apparently it didn't go through. . .I must have tried to attach too many files.  Anyway, here's the latest from Elder Phelps!

No email for me this week? I guess what goes around comes around, eh?

Anyways, things are still good here. I am basically done with my second transfer out here. I am going to be staying in Oradea for another transfer. My companion is leaving me though, he's headed to Alexandria, the smallest city open to missionary work.  I was in the MTC with my new companion for a few weeks, he is only 1 transfer ahead of me, so we'll see how things go. We leave on the train again tomorrow for Bucharest, and we return on Thursday again. 2 more nights in a row spent on a train.

So on Saturday, it was National Romania Day, just like our 4th of July. They had a big ceremony in the middle of the city, a bunch of Orthodox priests sang songs and did some stuff. It shows that church and state are not really separate here.... But it was interesting, and people took pictures of us, it was kind of funny. I bet they were like, " Look at those weird Americans standing on the corner!" Anyways, it was good, then that night, we went to the park and watched them turn on all the lights. That was cool, it was pretty cold.

Us at the park, National Romanian Day

Then Sunday, we got invited to a concert put on by the Baptist church in the city. We called the mission president and he said we could go, just make sure we don't get converted while we are there, that was way funny. So we went, and it was good. There was a lot of singing and the orchestra was awesome. We even got 4th row seats. They had a guy from Texas, a big black man, a baptist preacher come and talk. He spoke no Romanian, so it was translated as he talked into Romanian from English. Everything he taught was from the Bible and it would have been basically the same in our church. Most churches in the world are good and teach good things, but don't exactly have the whole pie, just some pieces or most of the pieces. It was interesting. It's easier to respect other religions when we know what they actually do and how passionate about their faith they are. I enjoyed going, and we went up and talked to the guy after. He vacations in Park City. I'm sure he knew who we were, we were in suits and nametags. But we just told him we enjoyed what he said and appreciate what he does for people. He said thanks for coming and we snapped a picture and that was it. Super nice guy. I'll attach the picture.


Me and my companion with the Baptist Preacher from Texas

After the concert, we had a lesson with one of the member families. After we talked for a bit, they fed us langos (scones basically) and I told him that our family is beekeepers, and then he walks in the other room and brings out this jar of honey. It was kind of runny and super dark. Then he tells us he MADE the honey with sugar and flowers. I didn't even know that was possible? Anyways, we had some on our scones and it was pretty good, not that sweet and super runny, but it was honey in my book. He's this old Hungarian guy that speaks pretty hard-to-understand Romanian, but he made honey. Funny story.

Til next week, Elder Phelps

Since when does Austin like Chili?

Hello!
So conference was good. Our train was an hour and a half late arriving in Bucharest, so we didn't have time to shower or shave or anything before the first session of the conference at 9. That was kind of annyoing. It was super funny, at the gara in Bucharest, they just have a bunch of random "taxi drivers" really just normal people who drive people around and try to rip them off. So we were walking, looking for a cheap taxi, and everyone wants to drive us, because we are american. So we are asking how much they all charge to get to where we need to go, across the city a little. This one guy said 30 lei (it's like a 10 lei trip if they use the meter) and we were like, nope, and kept walking, then he offered 25, we said no. Then 20, and we said yes. It was this old, piece of junk car that this old guy drove, but he took us to the church, we paid him and he gave us a receipt and everyone was happy. So that was kind of funny for the starting of the day.

The conference was super long, it started at 9 and ended at 5. We had a 45 minute lunch of some super awesome chili and brownies and ice cream for dessert. One of the senior couples there cooked for us. And we had 2, 15 minute breaks too. So it was a very long meeting. Elder Stephen C. Kerr, from the area seventy came. He is from Scotland, so he had a cool accent. Super funny guy, and he kept us all involved and attentive, mostly. After the conference ended, we looked at mail and packages and stuff at the church with all the other missionaries. I did get the package, thank you. And, our train to Oradea, which was supposed to leave at 8:40, was 75 minutes late coming from Constanta. So, we went to Subway, it was pretty good. Haven't had that it quite a while, and it tastes the same here as in America.

But our train finally showed up and we got on and basically went to bed. And when we woke up we were only in Cluj. Which is like 2-2.5 hours away from Oradea. We were going through the mountains, so that was really cool. Tons of little towns along the way. And we lost another 30 minutes on the way so we arrived in Oradea 2 hours late. But yeah, that's basically the trip to Bucharest in a nutshell.

Town called piatra craiului, on our way through the mountains between cluj and Oradea. Taken from the train on our way home from Bucharest.

My health is fine, a piece of the filling on my front tooth came off, but it'll be fine, I might go get it fixed, i dunno. Doesn't bother me at all. Apparently the dentists here aren't half bad, so we'll see. It's finally starting to be kind of consistently cold here. 

As far as a day goes, here it is:
6:30 wake up shower, shave, get dressed
7:30 breakfast
8-11 or 10:30 study (personal, companion, language)
That's basically every morning.
As for the afternoons, we usually have an English lesson before lunch which is usually about 1 or 12. Then if it's Friday or Thursday, we go to Caritas to do service. Other days, we take care of stuff for English (classes), go street boarding in the park, do member visits, we take a dinner break usually, also we contact former investigators, obviously we try to schedule lessons, but it doesn't always work. That's some of the main things we do. Every day is different, so it's kinda hard to say "this is what we do every day."

So if anyone in the family asks what I need for Christmas or birthday, I need like 10 bucks, with a letter on how they are doing. That would help the most I think, because it doesn't make sense to buy something there and then ship it here, it I can just buy it here for cheaper most likely. anyways, that's my two cents on the birthday thing.

That's basically it for the week. I'll send another email with a couple pictures. We went to the cetate (fortress in the middle of the city) here, so i'll email a picture. Transfer board comes out on Thursday, so we'll see if I get moved, or if I'm doing another one here. Also, we are going to Bucharest again next week for transfers and I need to do some visa paper work too. But yeah, until next week.

The fortress wall, we climbed up a little to this hole, I grabbed a brick above my companion, and it broke out, and got dirt all over him. Super funny!

Turkey Bowl -- Romanian Missionary Style

So fun things first.. We just got back (like 30 minutes ago) from Arad. We met up with the missionaries there and the ones from Timisoara and we played the Turkey Bowl football game. It was awesome. We played 7 on 7 flag football on this government owned "field" of mostly dirt, and some weeds.. Everyone got super dirty and had a great time. The sisters even played with us. One of the sisters here, she can catch ANYTHING, I was playing quarterback the whole game basically, and she didn't drop one pass, maybe one, but probably not. My team lost... 19-20 (we were playing that one point=one touchdown). Oh well, it was still super fun. And we did pretty good considering the other team had 2 people who had played football through high school and such. But, we had to get up at 4 AM!! Our train left Oradea at 5:07 and arrived at Arad at 7:40. Then we played the game at 10, then ate lunch as a zone at a pizza place. Good thing the restaurant was right across the street from the gara (remember that word, because I'm never saying or typing "railroad station"ever again in my life). We hopped on our train back and literally like 1 minute later it was pulling away from the platform. So yeah it was a super fun p-day. We arrived back in Oradea at 5:07 and here I am now! Haha

Turkey Bowl and the field we played on

I asked him some questions this week and here are his responses:

So, how goes the teaching of lessons?

Lessons have been hard to come by this last week. We have only taught less than 15 this whole transfer so far. It's pretty rough. Crazy how different the work is here than in Brazil or Africa where Carson and Nance are. Carson told me he taught 41 lessons one of the recently passed weeks. HOLY COW. that's insane. We are lucky to get 3 or 4 in a week. Anyways. The baptism is still a date, for the 5th of December, but we'll have to see if it happens. It's gonna be probably moved to a different day, because we will be in Bucharest for transfers that day. We'll see, it's a super peculiar situation with the investigator, so we don't know what's gonna happen.

How are you getting along with your companion?

Me and my companion get along pretty well. I would be fine with doing another transfer with him, but it's probably not gonna happen. This is his 3rd transfer here, he's probably going somewhere else. I had another exchange with our Romanian Elder, so that was another full day of speaking Romanian.

What is the best part of church on Sunday?

So church on Sunday. It's super long. Especially because it's all basically in the same room with the same people. But I learn tons of words on Sundays usually. It's a 3 hour language study for me.. haha. We usually go to the park and set up a table with Books of Mormon and pamphlets and people come talk to us. And studying. We have church at 10 so we miss 2 hours of studying in the morning, so we do it after lunch usually.

What is your favorite food so far?

So, here's the scoop on food here:
They eat tons and tons of cabbage here, and it's gross. Sarmale is one of their favorites, and I can't stand the stuff. Just look it up on Google so I don't have to explain. And they just use cabbage in everything. They fed us at Caritas some fried cabbage hearts or middles or something and I had a hard time eating them. Anyways. They have super good pastries and bread here too. Bread is 3 lei per loaf, way cheap. They have this thing like scones, but they put just sugar on it and sometimes like Nutella, those are way good, and super cheap, only like 2 lei. So we buy those a lot. I haven't had a Romanian soup that I haven't really liked yet, maybe one, and it was mushroom, so obviously I wouldn't like it, but for the most part, the soup is good. They have shaormas here, those are pretty good too, Google those too. But my favorite food so far is Mama Ana's chicken cordon blue (home made) and crepes with cream cheese and chocolate and berry sauce for dessert.

 Sign on the pizza place we ate at last week, "probably the best pizza in the city" funny

Another Encounter with the Guy from the Tram

Here's the latest from Elder Phelps!
"Things are still going pretty good for me here.  I'm in my fourth week of my 2nd transfer and it is flying by!  Crazy.  Time flies when you're having fun I guess.  But not much is new this week.  We didn't get to meet with any of our investigators this week, they were busy/sick/whatever else, but we met with both of them today, in the middle of P-day, so we had to work them in.  It's fine though.  We need to be flexible because we are here to help other people.

So I got my first haircut here.  It was 20 lei that included a wash and everything.  We went to a pretty nice salon place.  There were a bunch of men there getting pedicures, a little bit weird to me.  But yeah, it was like a 6 dollar haircut with a wash, can't beat that price in the US.... haha.

Remember that guy I told you about that called us the anti-Christ?  We had another run in with him the other day.  He stopped us on our way to teach English class and asked if we had a Book of Mormon, and of course we did.  I handed it to him and he began flipping through the pages and kept asking if it was the Bible.  We said no, and that we use it to teach about Jesus with the Bible.  He then told us to show him where it says "for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son." we said it doesn't say that because there is no book of John in the Book of Mormon and it's not the Bible.  He said it isn't valid then.  We tried to explain but he was getting snappy.  Finally he wrote in the front cover of the Book of Mormon we gave him, "This Bible is not valid, please leave romania." Then crossed out a random page in Alma, handed the book back to me and just turned around and walked away.  Super annoying, because now we can't give that Book of Mormon away or the pamphlets in it because he wrote all over them.  Oh well.  Funny story of the week I guess.

The other Elders have an investigator with a baptismal date, hopefully it doesn't fall through.  So that's pretty cool.

I finished reading The Inevitable Apostasy and the Promised Restoration by Tad R. Callister.  What an insanely good book.  I would definitely suggest reading that one.  So much to learn.  It gives every reason, logical, spiritual, that our church is true and all the things we do in our church are right.  I'm still amazed and I wrote like 30 pages of notes on it in my journal.  Super cool read.

As far as missionary work goes, it was a pretty slow week.  We gave out some pamphlets and a Book of Mormon while we had our street display set up in the park on Tuesday, and like I said, we didn't have any lessons.  We've been trying to contacts some former investigators, but haven't had any luck yet.

The weather here has been really annoying too.  One day it's like the North Pole, and the next day 70 degrees.  Similar to Utah.  But it hasn't snowed here yet.  Apparently it does, it just hasn't yet.  It rained cats and dogs a couple days last week, and we got drenched.  We didn't bring umbrellas because it didn't seem like it was gonna rain, but it poured.  We wrang water out of our suit jackets when we got home.  yeah it was that wet.   And, since the government controls our thermostat, our apartment is always burning hot.  I have had to sleep with no covers the last few days.

Oh and check out this video. It's a news coverage program about the church in Romania.   Cool program.  Understand what you can.  Some of it is in English. or if it doesn't work, google search "secretele mormonilor"  it means secrets of the mormons....... lame title, but it's way cool that the church got this much press coverage here."
http://www.realitatea.net/reporterii-realitatii_1045469_video.html#view

The video is really awesome, watch it if you can---it's about 18 minutes long.