Oulu

January 6, 2015

Hey! so yes.... mom I'm sorry again that I forgot to change you that our p day changed to tuesday..... I'm really sorry haha I feel the same way I felt when I was in wrestling and you were so sad and terrified haha it was heart breaking. It was so nice to hear that Ucla pulled out the victory in the Alamo bowl and that Jon Jones is still reigning champ! My new companion loves UFC as well so we were pretty pumped to hear that. I've been repping my UCLA stuff all the time so it's nice to know that they didn't let me down. 

 

Well I'm in Oulu! I've had a super crazy week. So yeah I was a little surprised to leave Helsinki already but I've always hear that Oulu is an awesome place to serve and I was really excited to come up here! I'm with elder Ahlquist who's from Boise Idaho and I've known him since day one of my mission so it's super sweet that we get to serve together now it's been way fun! Oulu is beautiful. It feels cool to be back in the north zone where I started out. The people are a little different up here than they are in Helsinki. It's hard to explain but northern Finland is just really cool. It feels a little more like a different world that down south. It's totally freezing today it's like negative 22 and it's crazy cold but luckily we have a car so that makes it a million times better. We live on the north side of Oulu in a more resdiential area but the church building is in the center of town so we drive into the city all the time. It's a really cool place it's just a nice good size center with cool buildings and stores and stuff then on one side is the ocean and then on all other sides it just goes out into forests. The forests are beautiful in the winter. All the trees are completely white with snow and ice and are totally frozen and it's just really cool looking. It's especially dark up here though it's full on pitch black by 3:00 so by the time we finnish lunch and get out the sun isn't even really visible at all it's just so low on the horizon all the time so it's way weird. I love Oulu already though the ward is way cool, there's a tone of cool YSAs that come out with us a lot and a lot of recent converts in the ward that are from Vietnam so I feel like I'm back at UCLA it's pretty fun. They all think it's way cool that I went to ucla too and some of them have family in California so it's been way fun getting to know all the people up here. 

 

So my week went like this: I left at 9pm Tuesday night from Helsinki on a night train. I slept in a little compartment in the train by myself which was super super weird. Then got to Oulu at 6:30 am the next day and elder Ahlquist and the other Oulu elders picked me up in the car so I got all my bags in and was even able to move all my weights so we've got the whole set up up here. Then we had a normal day on Wednesday then Thursday night we got on a night train and went back down to Helsinki for our monthly MLC meeting on Friday. We had that meeting, went to the temple, and then slept at the mission home. Then Saturday morning came back on a day train to Oulu which was kind of miserable but we got to see all of Finland pretty much on the ride so that was cool. But in spite of the crazy schedule the work here is going insanely well. We've got a ton of investigators and found a ton of new investigators last week. The most I've ever found on my mission. We have 10 people with baptismal dates so everything is just going great. I really like our investigators and three of them came to church on Sunday so I really cannot complain! It wasa  great week!

 

Well I love you guys so much! Thanks so much for the emails and love. I'll talk to you next week!