11 Months

Hey! I am glad to hear that all is well in Arizona!  All is good here in the Motherland! We are working pretty hard and its pretty hot right now:) There is this kind of poof/ snow/ cotton everywhere. It is falling from the trees and this kind of tree is planted everywhere in Irkutsk.  It is pretty annoying, it sticks to your face and gets in your nose and tastes SUPER bad. haha But it’s not a big problem, there has been worse and will probably be bigger problems in the future:) No worries.

Life is good! Our Korea trips are always short.   We are always in Korea for less than 12 hours. We fly in at like 7 oclock p.m.  We go to McDonalds then straight to the Temple and then sleep and then fly out 6 am the next day:) I haven't seen any Korean missionaries yet, but hopefully one day I’ll run into Calvin!

It’s it awesome that you met a lot of people this week. I love meeting people! This week we didn't meet a whole lot of foreigners. Some people from Germany who were trying to exchange their money, and that’s about it:( Sad.   I also got a message from a mom of one of the incoming missionaries:)

This week we had some good success:) We met a man named V____  who has a family and wanted to meet with us. He asked a lot of questions and some of the things he told us, some of his beliefs sounded a bit silly but he was super nice and he came to church and seemed to enjoy it:) Hopefully he comes back for more. There was an argument going on our whole 3rd hour about what to do in life. What do we put on the top spot, God or material possessions?  Our president of the branch said we put God on the top spot. A member said if we put God on the top spot we need to put material possessions right there with him. That took up about the whole time and I felt so embarrassed that they were arguing the whole time when we had investigators at church:( Next week hopefully is better.

There is a member here who has cool Soviet era military clothes:) We went over and did a photo shoot at his house:) I will send some pictures although most of them are on Elder Gray's camera.

I am going to Vladivostok Wednesday Morning at 3 am:) We will be having the MLC meeting with the new President! Pretty crazy:) :)  President Perkinson will be with us on July 2nd at MLC. His first or second day here he will be leading us. Hopefully all will go well, I will also have an interview with him on Thursday! No pressure. : p

This week we had our district meeting but our 2 sisters were in Angarsk. They couldn't come over to Irkutsk so we had to Skype them into the meeting which was pretty interesting:) I played the piano at church too. I like playing.  I know, I didn't think I would ever say that!  Back in the day I didn't see a reason to practicing but now I practice because I want our members to have a good Sacrament meeting. It gives me a reason to practice and its cool getting to play for them.

We made Peach Cobbler this week:) Not SUPER tasty, gotta improve our recipe if possible. Wish me luck!

I hope you have a good week:) I love you all!

Stay Frosty,

Elder Gardner