First Letter from Germany!!

Sorry this has taken so long, first things first, if you didn't get my letter, DO NOT WRITE TO THE MISSION HOME. The letters sent there will only be given to me once a transfer, every 6 weeks. So I won't see it till the end of transfers... and I don't want to wait that long to get letters. My new address is below, and unless written EXACTLY how you see it, I won't receive it, they are very picky about mail in Deutschland.

Elder Ryan K. Christensen

Kirche Jesu Christi

Heilbronnerstr. 30

Esslingen 73728

Germany

Sorry I haven't sent any mail home yet, I have had a ton of things to get taken care of here, and I haven't gone by the post office recently. Then I just decided to write home in an e-mail because I now have a lot more time to do so. The flight over was alright, I wasn't able to sleep much, because space was incredibly limited. That and over the Atlantic Ozean, we hit a ridiculous amount of turbulence... 200 mile per hour tail wind. Along with other things shook the plane fairly well. After that I wasn't able to sleep much. I figured that I slept maybe an hour or 2 at most. Which means that with 4 hours of sleep I had a 32 hour long day with about an hour or so nap in the middle. Needless to say, the first day was rough. They kept us awake all day long, so that when 10:30 came around all of the new missionaries were unconscious in bed. Jet lag, however was virtually gone the next day. 

After Landing in München, we met the APs and the Mission Präsident and his wife. The Präsident and his wife took our luggage in "das beast" (A Van that they have) and they drove back to the mission home. We on the other hand were all give a copy of the Book of Mormon and were informed that on the 40 minute train ride home we were supposed to give out our copies to people on the train. (The AP's came with us to make sure that we didn't get lost anywhere). Lucky for me and Elder Young, we already had a decent hold on German and could hold a conversation, so we could ask someone to talk with us, so that we could improve our German. We would start up a conversation, they would casually ask us how long we were going to be here, and we would say 2 years. They were dumbfounded. We then began to talk about our church... and, needless to say, we gave out a lot of pass along cards and Copies of the Book of Mormon. Something that not even the AP's were able to do :-) We got to the mission home, where we had lunch and were basically instructed for most of the day. We ended up spending the night in Munich, half of the missionaries stayed at the Mission Presidents home, the other half stayed in the AP's apartment. The next day we had a meeting at the church for 3 hours, then me and elder Heinrich, boarded a train, and took a 2 hour Train ride to Stuttgart on an ICE. ICE is Germany's high speed, long distance train. IT WAS AWESOME!

We took another train to Esslingen, and began the day with visiting a few people we are teaching. If all goes well, there could be as many as 8 people ready and baptized in the next 6 weeks! Missionaries in this area normally teach 15 to 20 lessons a week! We very rarely go tracting ( actually we don't tract at all ( Germans don't like surprised, so knocking on doors is pointless)) we street contact instead. Which brings me to the language. Here the Dialect is Schwäbish, it is one of, if not THE MOST DIFFICULT of the German Dialects to understand ( excluding Swiss, which is considered to be it's own separate language). But Schwäbish is just weird. They drop the endings of all of their words, pronounce what little of the word that is left different, and mush words together into what sounds like one word. For example the question: Verstehen sie? in high German sounds like: Voisch? in Schwäbish. When spoken quickly it actually sounds more Asian than German. I have a long way to go... Most people try to speak high german with us, but even then, some still have a heavy schwäbish accent which can be difficult to interpret. Luckily my companion can understand schwäbish, so he can help me out when I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.

Elder Heinrich, contrary to what his name may indicate, is not a native German, he is actually from St. George Utah. But he can speak German very well. He is a bit eccentric, but we get a long quite well. Things are going well in Esslingen, I don't know how much you have been able to see, but our area is HUGE! Its a 2 hour train ride from one side to the other (including connections). Imagine from our house, to Eagle mountain in length, and up to the point of the mountain in width. Its just Elder Heinrich and I for that whole area. But Esslingen is where most of the population is, so we don't really travel outside of it. We did travel to Owen this week though, we got a referral from Church Headquarters, so took a train down there. roughly 40 minutes of travel to visit one person in the incredibly small dorf of Owen. They had no interest... so we tried street contacting for the next 30 minutes until our train arrived then took a 40 minute train ride back to Esslingen. I wish you could all be here, I can only imagine how much dad and mark would love to ride these trains, they are way cool. Some of them are even double decker trains.

The food here is pretty amazing. We make our own food, for the most part, but a lot of German food is fairly easy to make, such as Spätzle and Maltaschen. Spätlze is a type of noodle that nearly everyone in Germany uses, its really good, and you can add almost any sauce to it. Maltaschen is incredible, its basically giant ravioli with spinach and meat on the inside, we like to pan fry in garlic, chili powder and other spices, its REALLY GOOD, and incredibly cheap! To make it for both me Elder Heinrich it cost roughly 2€ which is roughly $2.60 per meal between the two of us, and it is very filling. 

OH! GUESS WHAT?! The mission president just announced that are mission will be expanding into ITALY! Northern Italy is mostly German, and for the first time since World War I the German population is being allowed to worship in German, so we will go down there are start missionary work there! I could go to Italy German speaking! How cool would that be?! On the other hand though, Switzerland is no longer giving Visas to Americans, so I won't be serving there in the foreseeable future, but I could still go to Italy! 

Sorry this doesn't discuss the MTC, I have that letter written, and I will send it out today. It should arrive home on Thursday or Friday.

I love you all,

Elder Ryan K. Christensen

P.S. I need pictures! Pictures of family and friends so could people please send those? Some investigators like to see pictures of family and friends, I don't know if its to prove that we are actually normal People or not, but yeah, it would be appreciated.