Week 6 - Life in Bernburg Episode One: My New Father

I have very little time to write, and it's been a long week, so here it goes. Also, German keyboards are annoying.

My new father is Elder Harrison Mayer. He is from Bountiful, UT and he dies in six months (goes home. I thought it was weird too). It's just the two of us here in Bernburg, the Stadt seems wonderful though. The members here are very kind and helpful. There are six in our district. Elder Bodtcher (he dies after this transfer), Elder Watts, Sister Hammer, and Sister Föger, my mother (oldest sister in a new mission).

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Here is my apartment with some Elder Mayer to boot.

And who could forget the best part, "sparkly" Jesus. We have no clue why he's here or where he came from, but we love him.

My second day here we got locked out of our apartment. We live above the church, so we can walk downstairs and have wifi. We wanted to watch the district while we were eating lunch, so we walked out and I closed the door because I didn't want the Wohnung to get cold. Apparently in Europe, most doors have handles that don't turn on the outside. We were locked out of our apartment, locked in the church, and all we had was an iPad. No phone, no shoes, no coats, and hot food inside on the table. We facetimed a bunch of people and finally got Bruder Lebeau here to let us back in. One more problem, most Europeans leave the keys in the lock on the inside, so we couldn't get the spare key all the way into the door. We ended having to shim the door open with a piece of paper that had been laminated. We were locked out for an hour and a half 😅 I'll never forget how doors work here now.

 Today on P day we saw a duck. But not just any duck, a German duck. His name is Hanz.

 We also saw a castle, because Germany.

 This castle had bears, because Germany.

Everyone says that I speak wonderful German, apparently my grammar is pretty good and they can understand me well. Understanding them is a different story though. Our GML (Gemeinde Mission Leiter or Ward Mission Leader) is Bruder Schütze and he was once a German teacher. He is a machine gun, but he enunciates very well so I am able to understand a lot of what he says if I really concentrate. So it goes for now, I can understand little snippets of conversation and occasionally figure out what the heck is going on, but not very often.

It's been a little weird, we actually haven't taught any lessons yet, we have a lot of work ahead of us. There are no investigators to speak of here #whitewashing, we are going to do great things though. I love my father, and I'm excited to be here.

Tschüss,

Elder Spaulding