Email from the beautiful city of Metz!

Hey guys! So my last week went a little like this: Last monday happened to be a holiday here in France. On holidays here there is literally NOTHING opened, including big stores. So we emailed from the church, y'all weren't on but ca va, then we just went back to the apartment and took naps. It was awesome. You would thing that we would have the desire to visit monuments or something but nah...too tired. But of course we were up and out by 6 because P-day is more like partial day of preparation. Oh times have changed. Tuesday is where stuff got intense! After district meeting me and Quist started an exchange with the ZLs here in Metz. Sidenote before I forget: Did I tell you I got to set foot in Luxembourg 2 weeks ago? That country is SWEET everything is super nice. Especially cars! Anyways I was with Elder Valezquez and togethr we went super hard in the paint. In a total of about 4 hours of contacting during our exchange we taught 7 lessons and we had some of the most spiritual lessons on the street I've had in my life! One example: We contacted a guy in a park named Rapiau and at first he was one of the most closed off people I'd ever seen. He waved his hand, started yelling, and kept walking but like we should I said something else about our message that caught his attention and he stopped to just yell in our face. We tried to slow his speech down and once he regained composure we started teaching him. For the first 15 minutes it was really hard and he wouldn't let his gaurd down but then Valezquez, because he is super in tune with the spirit, shared a scripture in Moroni on infant baptism and it struck a cord how children are innocent. The guy agreed and it was the door for us to teach him. He has had one of the hardest and humiliating lives I've seen for someone and to be honest without the spirit we would have had no idea what to say but after 40 minutes he told us 'there was something different' about us and that we had changed part of his heart. BOOM SPIRIT! We left him with a BOM and we are setting something up this week when his work slows down. We had some other cool experiences and I was really happy with everything. Thursday and friday consisted of more service and moves. We have done so many moves lately it's crazy. Endless service. But I'm gettign ripped so it's all good. Yesterday we ate at Frere Raymonds again he played guitar for us. Him and Empey had a jam sesh with his two guitars. Elder Empey actually has a guitar in the apartment and we sing to stuff like every night. Our apartment song is 'Under the Bridge' by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Look it up. Good jam. Love you all a lot! Send my love to the fam and especially tayla. Not that she's my favorite...the work is going great and we are getting things rolling. Metz is just amazing

First Email from France!
October 6, 2014

I'm emailing from a tiny internet cafe in Saint-Severe in Rouen. It smells like cigarettes. Then again eveything does. I'm glad you have seen some pictures. I didn't bring my camera today but I didn't take a lot of pictures anyways but I will in the future!

Mission president here is awesome. Main church buillding and secretary offices are wayyy cool in Paris. It's in this really old but big stone building in a large alleyway. There's a small visitors center as well. It's by the new art museum. Right next to the modern art museum I think and Notre Dame. Saw Notre Dame and it is both huge and cool. Didn't have time to go inside. We don't have time to really do anything actually.

The language hasn't been as bad as I thought. I can understand 50 percent of what most people say and 100 percent of my companion. I can communicate basically everything I want to. Ordering stuff around town is difficult because I often can't understand enough due to my small normal words vocabulary but I can understand everything Gospel related. t's about what I expected only a little dirtier. Nothing here look clean but it's Europe so whatevs. All the building here are really old on the outside and new on the inside and I love that. EVERYONE here smokes. EVERYONE. It really blows my mind how much lung cancer there must be here. People just throw cigarette butts EVERYWHERE. Their public transportation and metro is really nice. here in Rouen it's all we use. We don't have a car but I don't want one anyways. You have to pay for bathrooms here which I find to be comical. I think the conversion rate for each Euro is 1.3 American dollars and if that's the case things here aren't super expensive but they're still more expensive. People in France just crack me up sometimes. I think it's funny how no one shows emotion in public. Little French kids are the cutest FYI I always look down expecting english and they speak french and it's the cutest thing ever.

The downtown is pretty cool. There is cobblestone everywhere over here which I like. The church is right next to the main massive cathedral and it really is massive. We spent yesterday at the Branch President's house and saw the 2 sessions of general conference and then the priesthood session. We saw the first sat session with a member satuday night and it was kinds long because it was in French and her family was crazy the entire time so that was a long 2 hours. Talks in conference were great from what I saw. We haven't seen the last session yet but plan to soon because I want to hear Bednar.

All the homes and literally everything here is so much smaller. And I know the people are smaller but proportionally wise things are smaller. The US has everything super big and in abundance it's crazy. The food here is totally different from the United States. I've just eaten everything whether I like it or not. Mom would probably be shocked. I doesn't bother me a lot. We haven't had any good food yet.

Have not even seen a glimpse of anything else really besides Notre Dame. We are really busy. We did do this thing the 2nd morning called consecration hill where we go to this big palace/castle thing with a huge garden and look out over the city east of Paris and compare it to Lehi's dream where he saw the great and spacious building and that was really cool.

I gave a priesthood blessing my 2nd day so that was cool. Rouen is pretty cool. It's starting to get a little colder. We never see little kids in the city which is different from Utah a lot. The French are very polite when they talk to us but almost all of them reject us. We found several amis this week while tracking and picked up 3 new people to teach. We had 2 before and 2 less actives. Had 8 lessons last week which wasn't bad.

Love you all so much and if you ever send letters I expect pictures of you guys in them.