Back Home in Austria

Hello Family!

Austria is awesome!!! As much as I loved Konstanz, I love being back home. My companion, Elder Buckley, is a way nice guy. He is really tall too so he makes me look somehow shorter. He is still really new in the mission so he hasn't seen much outside of Vienna but he is doing really well and is willing to work hard. St. Pölten is a pretty cool place! The city's inner part is really pretty which makes up for the outskirts which are, well.... less pretty. But I still love it and the people here are really nice which is the most important thing. I have already met a good amount of our members even though we didn't have church. We worked with our ward mission leader, Bro. Hirschmann, and his family on friday while we helped clean a lady's garden. His parents are really really old and have this cool old house. The father was even branch president in Haag a long time ago so they were excited to here that I know everybody there. We are given a lot of food here. In my first two days I ate so much sausage and red cabbage that it hurt. I love austrian food! This area is like Haag because we do a lot of service in small little villages. When we worked in the lady's garden, we were right next to the Donau, in the middle of a lot of really pretty mountains with castles on top of them. It was pretty cool. Sadly, though, I can't send photos this week because the computers in the church here go way slow when we try. But there will be some next week.

General conference was really great! We watched the saturday morning session on saturday night at one of our members, and watched the rest (besides sunday morning) at the stake center in Vienna. It was great because most of our zone was there and many were old friends so we got to catch up and stuff like that. Our zone is really great. 

Oh ya, before I left Konstanz we had a lesson with the L----s so that I could say goodbye to them. They are doing great and they said that they had prayed about Joseph Smith and that they knew he was a prophet! They are both really really excited for their baptism. I won't be able to visit them because they are far away and we can only visit baptisms in our district now. But I gave them my E-mail so hopefully I will hear from them soon. 

The work here seems to be going pretty well. The members are excited and willing to help. One member, Bro. Bauer, takes us around on fridays with his car so that we can visit potentials and investigators. There is a lot of organizing that needs to be done here though. There seems to be a lot of phone numbers to people who we don't know and things like that. But I am excited to get this area on fire. I can tell it has a lot of potential and I think that many of the lessons I learned in Haag about finding people where there aren't people will come in handy.

I am glad that you all are doing well! I can't believe that those trees are gone! And Happy birthday dad! I think I need a list of everybody's birthdays because there is no way that I will remember them all while I am out here. I will make sure to say hi to Geoff when he is here! He needs to make sure to eat the cheese. And lots of it. He also needs to drink Rivella. Basically just eat all the food that comes his way. It's all good.

I love you all!

Elder Eldredge