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. 

It's Already November

Me, my companion and the lady that feeds us once a week and her mother.

It's hard to believe that Austin has been gone almost four months!  The time flies and stands still at the same time -- kind of a funny phenomenon.  Here's the latest update. . .and a new photo too!

"My companion and I just woke up that day and I said Happy Halloween and he said thanks and went and took a shower and that was about the end of it. They don't celebrate it really here.  Mostly just like the bars and clubs have parties,  but no such thing as trick or treating.

So we had companion exchanges a few days ago.  I was with a native Romanian Elder for 24 hours.  He is originally from Romania, but has lived in Spain for most of his life.  He speaks Romanian and Spanish, and like 10 words of English.  So it was pretty hard to communicate, because I had to do it in Romanian, but we got along.  I gave our another Book of Mormon while I was with him, so that was good. His companion is learning a ton of the language, that's for sure. 

So last Tuesday we were in Arad for another zone training meeting.  We got on the train and took a 3 hour ride, had a 3 hour meeting, then caught the first train back to Oradea.  Kind of a long day.  We had a faster train on the way back and I talked to a guy for a little bit that recognized us as Mormons.  He was Pentecostal and had lived in New York, Canada, Florida, and California.  I didn't have a Book of Mormon with me (Fail) so I just gave him a pass along card.  He actually started talking to me first, because he heard us speaking English, he spoke very well.  But yeah that was Tuesday.

My companion is the district leader here in Oradea now, so we get to do exchanges with the Zone Leaders.  So they will be in town on Wednesday, and I'll be going to Arad again with one of them to work there for a day and come back Thursday night. 

Our English class started again, we have 6 new people in the advanced class and 3 new people in the beginner class.  They all speak English pretty well, and they speak Hungarian, and a couple of them speak German too.  And a bunch of people have called us Today and yesterday, so I think more people will come on Tuesday.  And they all said they would want to learn more about the church, from what they put on their sign- up forms.

That's basically it for this week.  It was kind of boring.   I blessed the sacrament again yesterday though." 

Giving Away My First Book of Mormon

Austin sent a great email today about his Romanian missionary adventures.  We are always grateful to hear from him and know that he is doing well.

"We finished watching conference the other day. The missionary age announcement was cool. Our mission president said it could potentially double the amount of missionaries in our mission over the next year. So that will be interesting to see how it plays out. I also saw that the applications have increased 400 percent. It's crazy. They are getting 4000 applications per week now. There are going to be a lot of missionaries. I dunno how they are going to do it, because the MTC only can hold about 3000 at a time, hopefully they have a plan that includes that sort of stuff. I'm sure they do. The elders behind me came into the country last week as I finished my first transfer in the field. Time flies when you're having fun I guess.

The weather here decided to cool off finally. It rained all day yesterday. Pretty heavy rain too and it was freezing. We had daylight savings time here too so it gets dark at like 5 PM now, that's kind of annoying because people think it's dark they can't leave their houses and meet and talk and stuff. Oh well. It's pretty cold today too, I wore a sweater and gloves today. The cold here is a bit different than the cold in Utah, it's a little more humid here so it feels colder. All the leaves are falling off the trees and winter is showing up finally. I'll take cold over hot any day of the week. The heaters in our house are super annoying too. We have no way to control them. The government just turns them on and off as they please. They work by running hot water through coils of pipe. Super inefficient, they could save a ton of money if they didn't do it like that, but then again, all the blocs were built during the communist era, and I guess that's how they did things. But basically our house gets either super hot or super cold, kind of annoying. Anyways.

So we will start another round of English classes on Saturday. We've been trying to get some more students to come. The first attached picture is our poster. We paid the government here to let us put them up at all the government owned advertising pillars and boards across the city. And we stuck some at the university here and at the library. And we hand out our little flyers to people too. (OK, so I am not as techno savvy and this blog won't let me insert the copy of the poster because it's a PDF file and not a JPEG---go figure! If anyone has any suggestions that could help this "old" mother, it would be appreciated -- haha!)

But yeah, here's the interesting story about how I gave away my first Book of Mormon to finish it all up:
We were on the tram on Wednesday on our way home for the night and this guy comes up to us and says "My name is..." and then kind of went off and looked out the window. About a minute later he came back and said, "My name is...." (trying to speak English with a puzzled look on his face). I said "My name is Elder Phelps." Then he pointed at my companion's name tag and asked us where the church was. We told him where and then he said it doesn't exist. And we said it does. He said no. And then he proceeded to tell us how we were the anti-Christ and how we were all trying to be greater than God. We said no, of course. He then said he had been called by God (we were beginning to think he was a little crazy by now) and received power through prayer and he could touch people and heal them and command sticks to turn them into serpents, stuff like that. By this time in the conversation 3 other teenagers on the tram are listening in. The crazy guy asked us if we had a book, so I pulled out my Book of Mormon (my companion gave his away earlier that day) and gave it to him. He started flipping through it and said it was anti-Christ.
And we asked how. He pointed at the cover and said it again. Then, one of the teenagers, I'll call him curly haired kid, asked what the book was. We told him and he said he'd heard about it before. And then, he told the crazy guy that the Book of Mormon talks about Jesus, just like the Book of Isaiah, the Book of Job, and the other books in the scriptures.

While he was saying this, my companion took the Book of Mormon and opened to 2 Nephi 25:26 and told the guy to read verse 26. The curly haired kid chimed in and said "verse 26!" The crazy guy took the book, and pointed. Then, the curly haired kid stood up and came over. The crazy guy started to read a different verse, and then curly haired kid took the book, said, "no, verse 26," and proceeded to read verse 26 out loud which says:

And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins.

While he was reading he emphasized the word "Christ" each time he said it. The tram stopped at our stop right as he was finishing up, but not all the way done reading the verse. The crazy guy tried to get off the train quickly but the curly haired kid stepped in front of him to make sure he heard the whole thing. As we were getting off the tram, the curly haired kid went to give us back the book and we said he could keep it if he wanted and he said, "Please! Thank you very much!" and he kept it and we got off the tram. As we were walking the guy was kind of walking behind us, he said he was just going home and he's not following us to our house and that he was sorry and it's good to be preaching of God and Jesus and then we gave him a card and said to call us if he wanted to learn more.

Pretty cool experience. A Romanian (probably Orthodox) basically made our point for us, even though he had only heard about the Book of Mormon, recognizing that it taught of Christ just like the other books of scripture. And I gave out my first Book of Mormon, so that was a plus. It's not every day that a random person on the tram will back you up on what you're saying when someone is accusing you of being an anti-Christ."

Isn't that a great story! Wow...a testament to how the Lord guides the work of His servants!

Being a Missionary is Awesome!

Austin and an elder who was going home to New York

We got a great letter from Austin today!  He is doing awesome and seems to be loving his mission thus far. Here is the scoop:

 

"Anyways, things here are good, Transfers are this week, and I will be staying here in Oradea for another 6 weeks.  Until the 5th of December at least, could be staying here for half my mission, nobody knows..... haha.  We had a big district conference yesterday.  All the missionaries and some members from Timisoara, Arad, Cluj-Napoca, and Deva came to the city for a big meeting that the mission president presides at.  It had 2 sessions, Priesthood/Relief Society, and the general session for everyone.  It was super long, the whole thing lasted about 4 hours.  The meetings were longer because the talks given in English had to be translated into Romanian line by line.  Like for the mission president and his wife, they both spoke and don't speak Romanian.  There were a few other people who gave the talk in English first too.  It was a good day though.  We got  to visit with the other missionaries from other cities and we had interviews with the president.  They finished off a week long of driving, Oradea was the last stop, they had already been to Arad, Deva, Timisoara, and Cluj-Napoca before the conference.  So they left pretty quick to drive to Cluj-Napoca to fly back to Bucharest today.  They are doing all the exit interviews the next couple days and interviewing new missionaries coming into the country.  The president's assistants get to drive the car all the way back though, while they fly, that was funny."

The other 3 missionaries in Oradea in the park -- Austin took the photo

I asked him about some specifics of what days he does what, what they do on P-day, and about what they eat, how he is sleeping etc.  He replied,
"Our service at Caritas is on Thursday and Friday from 12:30 to 2.  And we just serve the food and clean up the cafeteria and wash the dishes after, we don't usually cook anything, it's all already made when we get there.  We teach English classes on Tuesday and Saturday.  For about  1 1/2 hours, depends on the day.  My companion and I taught the advanced class this transfer, so we might be teaching beginner next transfer, but we have an Elder coming into the city who is a Spanish native, but is also from Romania and doesn't speak very much English at all, so he and his companion will probably teach the beginner class.  Another elder got on a train to go back home to New York on Saturday.  The first picture is me and him. .  P-Day, we study in the morning as usual, then we usually go grocery shopping. Then we go to an internet cafe, or the library, to email and such.  Then we just go shopping places, go to the tailor to get clothes fitted.  That's awesome, we have a tailor right next door to our bloc, so basically all of my clothes are tailored now.  It's super cheap, it's like 4 dollars to take pants in and hem them and only like 2 dollars to slim shirts up.  But after that we usually play basketball or soccer at a park or something.  We just do laundry when we need to, we have a washer in our apartment, so it's not necessarily on P-day.  I just went to the gym once,  I was on an exchange with an another elder, and he got permission to go, so we went while I was with him for a day.  We don't usually go, my companion and I.  As far as food goes, we still eat at Mama Ana's once a week.  And usually at McDonald's once a week too, the prices are about the same as they are in the US so that's kind of annoying, should be cheaper.  But it tastes good when we go.  Other than that, we just buy groceries and make food at our apartment.  Cheaper that way, and we can make what we want.  We had pancakes for breakfast this morning, and sandwiches for lunch.  Usually stuff like that.  We make fries a lot, noodles, chicken, rice.  A lot of stuff.  We eat bananas and grapefruits often too and yogurt.  Pretty much whatever we feel like.  We usually only eat out for snacks.  They have chocolate filled soft pretzels here that are amazing.  I'd say we buy those the most.  There's all sorts of food to get on the street here.  The gelato is pretty good, they have these things called shoarmas, look that up on google, that have just everything in them.  All these things I don't like, but somehow, it tastes good.  They have like chicken, mystery sauce (it's different everywhere you go), cabbage, tomatoes, onions, more mystery sauce (different than the first sauce), lettuce, and whatever else they have which also depends on where you buy it.

I sleep fine, we obviously don't get enough sleep, but that's how missionary work is.  Long days and seemingly very short nights.  Church is good, still hard to understand a lot of people, but church is a good place to learn the language and I have been learning a lot there.  I don't have a calling, sometimes I bless or pass the sacrament, but that's about it.  They don't even have 2 counselors in the branch presidency here, just a first counselor.  We have watched all of conference except  the sunday morning session.  So we are going to do that soon, probably in Romanian though, because of the new elder coming into the city who doesn't speak English.

But yeah things are great, I'm still learning a ton.  I bought a new camera so that's taken care of.  I haven't got the packages yet, they only brought mail with them.  But one of the elders is coming back from Bucharest on Thursday and he should bring them, so hopefully I'll get them on Thursday.

I wish the weather would make up it's mind here.  One day it's freezing, the next it's too hot.  Winter just needs to come.  The work is good, but slow.  It's tough.  I just got a letter from Mike shepherd that said Carson teaches 30 lessons a week in Brazil, and Brian Nance does similar in South Africa.  Very different here.  People don't want anything to do with it.  Pretty interesting.  The whole mission only has 4 people on the list to be baptized in the next 2 or 3 months.  Crazy.  But we just get out and do it, that's what matters.

Things are great, being a missionary is awesome!"

The following are some pass along/calling cards that Austin sent to Jensen:

Lost Email. . .Found!

Austin re-sent the lost email from October 8th.  He is doing well. . .here's a bit of what's going on:

"Things are good, we have taught more lessons this week than any other week in the mission so far.  Mostly to less active members and recent converts.  We have 3 investigators right now, so it's kind of exciting.  The Church is definitely small in this country.

I haven't seen general conference yet, we are downloading the sessions right now and we are going to watch them another time at our house on our DVD player.  I'm excited to watch it.   With the time difference, the Saturday morning session didn't start here until 7 PM and we were busy so we didn't get to watch it.  And, everything is closed on Saturday except the crappy computer place that my phone back home is faster than basically.  So, we didn't watch it, but we will.

We met with a guy yesterday.  He has been in America for the last 4 months working.  He'd talked to missionaries before, and remembered us when he got back here and called us.  We set up a meeting and it was pretty cool.  He's 23 and is currently going to college in Oradea.  He is studying theology and English.  And he is super curious about the Church and Joseph Smith.  He is going to Moldova this week and said he would 'definitely' read and call us when he gets back.  So, hopefully he does.  Super nice guy.

It's still hot here, and now we have to wear our jackets (suit coats), because it is between conferences.  Hopefully it cools off soon, I'm ready for the cold to happen. (Speak for yourself Elder Phelps)

It feels normal to be here now, I'm pretty adjusted to the schedule and the time change and stuff.  I dunno if I've told you about the service we do twice a week?  Anyway, we volunteer with the Catholic Church here and help them serve food to the homeless and needy people and stuff.  We go every Thursday and Friday.  Super humbling experience.  Everyday in this country you see people that carry all they have in a grocery bag and see people picking through the dumpsters.  They actually have cages around most of the dumpsters so people can't go through them.  Super sad to see.  But it makes me even more grateful for where I come from.  We are really blessed to live in America.  People here dream of moving there.  When Romania joined the EU (European Union), many citizens moved to Germany and Italy and France to work, because they didn't need a passport.  They are very proud of being part of the EU.  All of the products they make here say 'produced in the European Union' on the back instead of 'made in Romania.'"

"Me next to a hearse, check out the license plate."

Our Kitchen