Wunderbar!

Wow this week has been sufficiently crazy! I experienced my first eating appointment this week... Meine Gute... That was a lot of food. Unfortunatly, food is a HUGE part of Austria culture, and their feelings are hurt when you 1) don't eat every thing they give you 2) don't say yes to second helpings or 3) don't accept random food they feel obligated to give you when you come to their home! I am thoroughly convinced that the Lord blesses missionaries stomaches and tastebuds to be able to take on the amount and variety of food they have to consume. I thought the MTC was rough... stuffing my face here has become quite the obstacle. I am grateful, however, that I have found a new 'like' for certain foods that I never liked before. Exibit A: Ice cream with fruit. IT'S AMAZING!!! Where has it been my whole life and why was I so opposed to it before? Exibit B: Granola cereal with cornflakes. Best invention in the world if I do say so myself! Exibit C: Salmon. Had that for the first time ever! I think my like for fish was tainted ever since my fishing trip with Dad when I was 8 yrs old... something about having fish for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a week straight makes me not crave fish that much. I thought all fish had bones in it and tasted basically the same. Boy was I wrong.

The scenery here is amazing! We went to visit family Kaiser. They are so sweet! They live on a farm ON the Alps and the view from their home is breathtaking. Their children are adorable. There is Sandra (12; almost the exact same age as Rachelle actually! Her birthday is at the end of March) Then there is Peter (11) and Paul (10) Marlene (6ish) and then Mattius (3) I was swept off my feet by little Mattius! He had just returned from an exciting ride in the front loader of the tractor driven by Paul. Mattius got on his little "FisherPrice" version of his front loader tractor and went to the end of the drive-way. I didn't pay much attention to what he was doing because I was trying to keep up with a conversation with Sandra. Much to my surprise, Mattius pulls up right next to me and opens the basket of the front loader and gives me probably the sweetest little flower in the world! (Okay so it was a week with little blossoms) But it was soooo cute!!! I love flowers and from this little prince charming, they were priceless ;)

Another cool experienced that happened later that day was when we were out finding people after an appointment fell through. It was getting pretty cold and it started to rain. We had umbrellas luckily though. We went to a potetial investigator's apartment and they weren't there (shocker I know) so we rain through the rain back to our warm car. Well, as I was sitting there, a lady was just sitting at her window watching us and the rain, probably thinking that we were crazy or something. I knew we needed to go talk to her so I looked at Sister Downs and said, "Let's go talk to her real quick" so we left our warm car and talked to her by her window in the rain for maybe a minute or so but she told us we could come back! We set an appointment with her to see her tomorrow. Schau ma mal (We shall see).

Probably one of the crazy funny things I saw this week is an old grandpa just walking down the streeet in a speedo. Classic European look ;)

I wish you all the best week of your lives! "The happy life isn't found, it's made" - Camille Eyring Kimball. So destiny is yours! Use it wisely!

Love always,
Sister Fokken

PS My new address is:

Salzlände 15/21
8700 Leoben
Austria

Hope to hear from you soon!!! :)

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