No, she dosen't know anything!

Hello there!

I hope that everything is swell where you're all at. It's been another exiting week here for us, let me tell you.

So, let's get strait to it.

This week, we found a new person to teach. Yippe-ki-yay! The story behind that one is pretty great. As I've mentioned before, the Oakland temple has a visitors center, and us missionaries are encouraged to take people to it. So, we decided to bring one of our members. I've mentioned her before, too; she was inactive for a few decades, and just now is returning, so we thought that we'd bring her to the visitors center for one of our weekly meetings with her. She decided to invite her friend along, which of course us missionaries were exited to hear. 

So, we meet them up in Oakland. The visitors center was a pretty great experience. They have pretty much everything that they have in the Salt Lake City one, and we showed them through that thing (the name is escaping me at this moment in time) where you go into that room and it shows some videos and you move along the room and there are dioramas of a house and such. I know that this description is rather vague, but you'll have to bear with me here. We also taught about the Book of Mormon, and listened to the recording that plays by the big Christus statue (If I'm being honest, most of the teaching was done by the Chinese-speaking sisters that were on shift on Friday, but, in all fairness, that is kind of their job...). Our member loved the VC (more on that later), and it appeared that her friend had a very spiritual experience as well. 

After we were done with the presentations and teaching, we talked to our new friend (May, is her name) for a few minutes, and invited her to church. And, she came yesterday! Some of our members were very friendly to her, and we set up a teaching appointment for this Wednesday. Yee-haw! That was a pretty exiting turn of events, all because a member decided to invite her friend to an “activity."

Our other person we're teaching is still coming to church, which is also really great. He's super busy throughout the week, so unfortunately we could not meet with him this week. But, we invited him to read the Book of Mormon, and he says he will. We'll try to catch him on Sunday at church and see if he can stay for a few minutes after so we can teach him, and we're going to follow-up on his Book of Mormon reading this Wednesday via text. He seems to always have a good experience when he comes to church, so hopefully he'll want to learn and continue to progress. We'll see, though.

We went on some exchanges again this week. We went with our district leader in his area. They are Spanish missionaries, and a lot of what he wanted to do is contact formers (people who the missionaries used to teach, but then dropped). So, we were going to a bunch of houses, where the people spoke Spanish. And then we had a lesson, where the lady spoke Spanish. You can probably guess that I didn't do much speaking for the first part of the day. It was pretty fun, though, being on bikes. It was a welcomed experience. 

The interesting thing happened after dinner, though. We will often have dinner together as the elders of the zone on Thursdays, and since we were on bikes we called the Zone leaders to come pick us up, since they had said that they would be around the area we were in. So, they come, and we lock our bikes into their bike rack in the parking lot of some Mexican restaurant, and then head off to dinner. After dinner, the zone leaders say that they'll drop us off at this one place because it's close to where both of us will be working for some finding time. So, we go there, and get out to unlock the bikes. My companion (who, remember, is the district leader for this exchange) reaches into his pocket... No key. His other pocket... No key. He looks in his backpack... No key. So we look in the car. In the cupholders, under the seats, between the seats, on the floor, everywhere. No luck. So, after that mad search, we decide to head back to the parking lot where we put the bikes on the rack, to see if we had dropped them over there. Nothing. We went into the restaurant to see if anyone had turned the keys in. Nope. We rushed back to the place we ate dinner at and did the same thing over there. No luck. So, we saw no alternatives to simply returning to the apartment and figuring something out. When we got there, we were, luckily, able to get the bikes off of the rack, but they were locked together. They still are, at this moment, locked together in the Spanish Elder's apartment. We were bus missionaries for the rest of the evening.

One final note, this week I finally had good potatoes. Don't worry, they weren't mashed. It's still a clean sweep of abominable "food" in that department. These ones were roasted, and they gave me a nice little taste of home.

Anyhoo…

Bye.

-Blunt Ben

P.S. "Before you came along we Bagginses were very well thought of."

P.P.S. I realized this week that I have not seen a moth since I got here. Do they not have them in California or something?

P.P.P.S. If you don't mind reading some sad stories, you should read "Be of Good Cheer" by Thomas S. Monson in April 2009