OUT OF MILAN! April 3rd, 2010

Pop, you complained about my letters getting boring since I had been in the same city for three weeks in a row. I was not able to get myself promoted to Assistant to the President yet, but I was somehow able to work out two trips outside of Milan. Neither were really on purpose. The first one was pretty close to Lake Como (not to the city of Como, but to the part near the city of Lecco) and at the foothills of the Alps. We have this crazy (but in a really good way) new convert named Ludmilla who was baptized in another city but recently moved into our ward...or so we thought. She has been begging us to come to her house for some native Belarus food and relaxation (she is superduper into health, yoga, massage, etc.) and we finally decided to go the day after her birthday for our 2 hours that we have everyday for lunch and language. She didn't tell us exactly where she lived but told us to go to the train station then call her to find out where we should take the train to. Bad move. We found out that she lives about 45 minutes outside of our zone. Long story short...our Mission President and Ludmilla had a battle, and Ludmilla won. Our good fortune. It was sooo sooo sooo nice to breath fresh air, see a real Italian village, sit in her kitchen with the window open looking out on the mountains, rolling hills, etc. and listening to the stream rush past her house. It is no wonder the people in Milan generally don't think much about God! If they can't see any of his creations ever it would only be natural to forget about him and focus on the things that are constantly surrounding them...clothing stores, money, food, etc. Speaking of food...Ldmilla made some really good potato pancake things that I loved. She said it was a Russian dish. If you want to google this town, the train stop was called Olgiate C.B.

Our second outing this week was to Torino. It was not quite as relaxing as the other. We got a call from the office on Friday saying to go on Monday to pick up Sister Prina's permit. We got up at 4am to get there when the office opened at 9, wait in a giant hall with about 600 other people for 5 hours, then got back home around 7. We had a few really nice experiences, though, while waiting. There was a family from Romania sitting next to me with 2 little kids. The parents were completely ignoring the kids and the kids were super duper intrigued by me writing in my journal, so I started drawing with the kids and entertaining them. In normal life I probably would have been annoyed by them for distracting me...that's the great thing about being a missionary...in the end we are called to love and serve people and there really isn't anything more important that I should be doing. A little later on we talked to this awesome family of gypsies from Yugoslavia that live in a "camp" here. They had about 6 of the mot beautiful children I had ever seen. Haha, one of the little boys was telling me he wanted to be a police man when he grows up and I thought he said he wanted to be a house cleaner so I started telling him about how much I love vacuuming and miss having carpet and asking him about which chores he liked to do most. Lots of confusion during that conversation. Anyway, we shared a little bit of our message with them and left them with the Torino missionaries address. I didn't see too much of Torino...we stopped by one of Sister Prina's favorite chocolate shops and to 2 different train stations and that's about it. To get to one of the train stations, though, we went through the center, older par tof town which was really charming. I think I saw the spot where Pop took the picture when Mom and Pop were there on their mini trip.

On our way back on the train we met my favorite Italians yet. There was a big group of businessmen that work together in the city and during their hour long transit every morning and evening they play a very roudy game of cards on a big piece of cardboard that they set on their laps and bring with them every day. Since we don't get into many houses of Itaians doing door to door (or even have many of them open the door...they prefer to just have conversations yelling through the door) it is always really nice when we have positive interactions with them out and about and get to learn a little more about the culture, etc. In fact, yesterday we had another really nice native Italian experince. Last week after doing email my comps had a very odd craving for McDonalds and were positive they couldn't make it until we got home to eat. So, even though our day time was over, we stopped by McDonalds. I was kind of frustrated, but Heavenly Father, as always, was merciful and taught me another lesson on patience and placed a golden opportunity for work in my path. One of our Italian members was sitting in McDonalds with a group of about 6 friends and had just been talking to them about the church. So, I was able to chat with them while my companions had their "McItalians". Then we had a return appointment set up with this group of retirees yesterday at a park where they all hang out together in the afternoons. If we would have just approached the group and started trying to explain who we were, what we were doing, etc. no way they would have listened to us. But because of the member they were way way more open. Haha, except for Pascuale who is really aethiest and really didn't think there was a need to pray to invite the spirit into our lessons. I had to convince him to let me pray by saying I would just pray for the people in Chile... by the way, I really have no idea what happened in Chile so if anyone wants to update me Id appreciate it.

Remember the girl that was starving herself...we finally had an appointment with her and a friend this week and it went really well. They are meeting with us again but are afraid to talk to tell their parents about it just like our group of underage Filipinos...

OK, I am going to try to send some pictures now so I'll wrap this up and write more after if I have time. I am really sorry if this letter is not understandable...the keyboard is really horrible.

Favorite scriptures of the week: The whole book of Ephesians.

Love you,
Lauren