Transfers of to Oulu, way up North!

 Hello everyone! Well it was awesome to skype everyone on Christmas! I swear it gets funnier every time, I love you all so much! The kids are all looking huge and adorable and I can't believe that they can all say so much funny stuff. It looks like they had a sweet  Christmas! I had a great Christmas over here! Well I will go through my whole week but first I'll tell you about my change call. So of the three of us, Elder Chapman (who just got here) went to Espoo (where I used to serve) Elder Mcknight is staying here in Marjaniemi and I am going to Oulu! Oulu is a way sweet biggish city way up in northern Finland. It's about 200,000 people (the biggest city in northern finland) and I'll be serving as zone leader up there with elder Ahlquist! I'm so excited to be with elder Ahlquist he was in the MTC with me and then we were in Turku for 6 months togeter (he served in the other ward in Turku) so I know him super well and we're already good friends so I can't wait! Oulu is in the north zone where I started my mission so hopefully I get to go visit Seinäjoki and reflect on the good times up there. I've always really liked Oulu and have thought it would be sweet to serve there so I'm way pumped! It's a bit of a bummer that I have to serve there in January and February because it's going to be absolutely freezing and pitch black all the time but I'm still way pumped! We'll have a car up there too so that will be nice. At least I don't have to bike all the time. So I will leave Tomorrow night at like 9 pm from Helsinki and then take a night train all the way up there and get to Oulu at like 6:30 the next morning. I've never ridden a night train so that will be kinda cool. 

Well even though I'm excited to see Oulu I'm also pretty bummed to leave Marjaniemi. It's a great place down here in Helsinki, and much warmer but it's all good. Yesterday at church the whole ward got in the chapel after church and sang God be with you till we meet again to me and the other to missionaries leaving from the ward so that was super nice. I took some pics. Our week was a ton of fun though. On Christmas Eve we went down to Helsinki to the big Tuomio Kirkko which is a big huge white Lutheran church down there and we watched a special Christmas Eve Service thing so that was pretty interesting and cool to see. It was way beautiful inside the church. It snowed way hard like that entire day so we had a bunch of snow for Christmas which was really nice. On Christmas Eve we went over to the family's house that lives in our ward that have the five kids that love having us over and we at with them and all the kids opened all their Christmas gifts and it was way fun! It reminded me of home a little bit. Then on Christmas day we went to a members house who is just a finnish family and they have 5 kids but they lived in San Antonio Texas for 6 years and just moved back to Finland like a year agao so they are way cool! They're kids all speak better english than they do finnish so they all speak in english to each other and the parents just speak finnish to them and us but they are a super cool family. So we hung with the dad of the family and played some board games with him and just hung out for a while then we went over to our bishops house to eat and hang with them and that's where we skyped from so that was a ton of fun! Then the next day we went back to the same family that used to live in Texas and we played a game of Lord of the Rings Risk which was super fun! I love risk and the lord of the rings version is super fun haha so we played a nice game of that then that day we got our change calls. So the next morning elder Chapman left to Espoo and it was back to just me and elder Mcknight. Despite the fact that we weren't allowed to do missionary work most of the week we still were able to meet with a few investigators and the work is going really well here. 

Well that's all I got for the week. I love you guys so much though! THank you again for the Christmas gifts and for the sweet skype session! I love you all and will talk to you next week!