Happy Thanksgiving!!
That's super sad I completely forgot it was Thanksgiving this week until someone told me. Germany doesn't celebrate it:/
This week felt super fast and super slow at the same time. There's not much going on out here at the moment to be honest. But Fritzy and I make the most of it. It has rained literally EVERY DAY since I've been here. If I see another drop of rain I'm going to go insane. Which is probably tonight. We have no means of transportation other than bikes, and there is not a single piece of flat ground in this Gosh forsaken city. 100% cobblestone, huge potholes randomly everywhere, dirt etc.etc. The elder before me was like 6 foot 2 and the seat is way too high for me so my feet barely reach the pedals. I wanted to lower it but unfortunately for me the last elder took the bike tool with him? Mix all that in with rain and you get Elder Miller nearly falling off his bike every 10 seconds. Elder Fritz has fallen off twice already. I'm sick of being soaking wet and having a soar rear end all the time so I'm pushing for a car - we will see what happens there. We can't even reach a couple of our Dorfs in our area because they are too far.
ANYWAYS, we meet with this guy named Mike a couple times a week. He's kinda got a rough life backstory and he has recently gotten it back on track. He has a smoking problem and we are working on that with him right now. He comes to church every Sunday though and I can for sure see a baptism there in the future so I am really excited about that.
Landry is one other guy we are trying to teach. He's from Africa and I have sometimes a bit of a hard time understanding him. Super cool guy but every single time we go over there, no matter how hard we try not too, we end up back at the subject of "How do we know Jesus wasn't black? I think he could be black." And he's 100% serious. He says he wants to be baptized but until he gets answers to his questions of what skin color did Jesus, or Adam and Eve have, he can’t…. It's honestly really frustrating. He came to church on Sunday though so that was awesome!
I can't remember if it was Thursday or Friday but we finally got around to celebrating Elder Fritz' 20th birthday. His family sent him a cake and frosting. We made the cake, but then something must have happened to the frosting, cause it was all watery and yellow and nasty looking.. So Fritz was like, “ well we can just make our own frosting, I know how." A stick of butter, some milk, and an entire box of powdered sugar later we still did not have frosting. I don't even know how to describe what we had. So we kinda looked at each other and decided we should probably just go buy frosting at the store. Unfortunately, it was too late at this point - we weren't allowed to go out - so we put the cake in the fridge. We looked back at the substance we made and we didn't want everything going to waste so we just started throwing random ingredients in there: eggs, baking Soda, vanilla, and then we put it in a cupcake pan and threw it in the oven! Actually turned out not bad, tasted like vanilla powdered sugar bread! We were proud. Made something out of nothing:)
We went by some contacts with no luck, saw a fight break out at the train station, what else... Forst is kinda rough. This is the first city I've been in that when I walk the streets at night I am always checking my back and making sure I'm aware of people around me. The only bank that Forst has got broken into so we can't even pull money out here right now.
All in all I like Forst though. It's what you make of it:) I'm grateful I'm here with Elder Fritz and that we are having fun regardless of maybe some not so great situations. It could be worse. We went to Berlin today for Pday because it's only about an hour and a half away. I have missed that place so much. It's so happy/sad being there because we can only be there for a few hours before we come back and there is SO MUCH TO DO. I can't wait to come back after my mission.
I'm grateful for my family and friends and all the support I get out here! I love you guys. Have a good Thanksgiving, eat lots of good food for me!
Elder Miller
