Uke 55: Cold, Dark, and Happy

A CRAZY GUY JUST PUNCHED OUR CAR. We were on a bridge crossing a river to get to the church to send emails, when the car in front of us stopped suddenly. At first, we thought the car might have died or something, but after a few seconds, 2 women and one angry guy got out of the car. The guy took a book out of the car and threw it in the river, and started yelling. He then looked at us and saw we were looking at him (we were just stopped behind his car in the middle of the road so there wasn't much else we could do) and then he started yelling and came over and punched the car on the hood. I drove out of there real quick. I never expected to experience anything like that in Norway but I guess people can be crazy no matter where you live.

Anyways... It has been a great week with my new companion, Elder Baughan! We are both super happy to be here and we are getting along really well! I hope we do 2 transfers together because he's a bro and also I really want to be here for Christmas.

Winter is getting closer and closer up here. It got down to -10 C a few days this week, and probably colder in the nights. It snowed a little and a lot of rivers and lakes froze. Also the roads are icy so that is really fun! We only get about 4 hours of sunlight every day, but luckily the skies have been pretty clear so we can at least get the most out of that. We went on a hike with Geir today and it was sunny but FREEZING!  Geir didn't want gloves but somehow he survived. The view was beautiful and we sang a disko song at the top.

Another cool thing we did this week was driving to Hammerfest! We left after lunch a couple days ago. I guess we forgot that the sun sets at 2:00 in the afternoon. We should have left earlier, but we got some nice sunset pictures on the drive before we arrived in the worlds northernmost city. We tried to visit some members and some other people formerly taught by missionaries.

We haven't seen northern lights at all since Elder Baughan moved up north last week so please pray for us! Hope yall have a good week

Uke 54: How Deep Will the Cracks Be?

Hey yall it was an awesome week here in Alta!

The most exciting news is that I am getting a new companion tomorrow! His name is Elder Baughan and he is moving here from Hamar just like I did a few months ago! I don't know him super well yet but I think we will have an awesome time together! This is going to be a good transfer! We will officially be entering "mørketid" in a few weeks, which means the sun will not rise up here again until February next year. 

We drove up to a town called Skaidi this week with Linnea and had dinner with Knut and Jorun Altmann, who are some members that live there. Knut is a hardcore fisherman and wildlife guy. He goes on long hikes in the mountains with his dog every day. He also held the record for catching biggest salmon of the year in this area twice in the last few decades. Jorun made Lapskaus for dinner and it was awesome! They were planning on using some fresh fish or reindeer meat but it ended up not working out so they made what they called "muslimsk lapskaus" (muslim stew) because they used lamb meat. We ate lots of food and had a koselig kveld.

I want to share a story Linnea told me this week that was one of the funniest things I have ever heard: You need to know Geir to fully appreciate this but oh well. So Geir is really obsessed with elevations and distances and things like that. He knows the exact elevations of like 100 mountains, and how many light years it is to many different stars. He just thinks its really interesting. One day, when Geir was chilling out on the porch, some Jehovahs witnesses came up to him and started talking to him, not knowing who he was before. They told him about how the end of the world was coming very soon and how there would be lots of disasters and big earthquakes. Gier thought that sounded interesting and he listened to them for a couple minutes of them talking about earthquakes that would crack the earth. And then he asked them "How deep will the cracks be?" The JW's left after that haha... I love Geir.

That's about it for this week. I am really excited for next week! Ha det bra.

Uke 53: A pretty good week!

Not a lot happened this week but it was a pretty good week! We took a trip to Kautokeino on Friday so that was cool! We went there to visit our new member, the Danish lady who just moved there. She works there as a silversmith at a silver museum/shop and she gave us a tour of that, which was pretty cool. Then we had dinner with her and it was really hyggelig! Before we met up with her, we had a little bit of time to wait before she got off work so we took that as an opportunity to explore Kautokeino a little bit. It didn't take long to see everything there was to see in that tiny little boonie Sami town but it was pretty fun!

Another highlight was church on Sunday! We had 11 people in church plus one on Skype, doubling the usual number of people! We had a testimony meeting and a good lesson about Monarch butterflies. A few hours after church, we had dinner with one of the more active members who just recently got back from a few months of traveling. He made some deilig får i kål (lamb in cabbage) for us and told us about his home country of Ukraine. He struggles with speaking Norwegian so it was a little hard to communicate but we kept pretty busy eating that awesome food! 

Other than that, we saw some good northern lights, played basketball again, and banked on a lot of doors. We met a few people who said we could come back and teach them about the church which was awesome because we haven't had many people to teach here recently.

Here are some pics of nordlyset, Kautokeino, and our husky puppies

Uke 52: Getting Involved in the Community and Feeling Blessed!

Tomorrow is the 1 year anniversary of the day I came to Norway!!!! This week was an awesome way to celebrate that! 

We started off the week with a good p-day spent exploring one of the nearby rivers. We wanted to drive further down the river to go see the only canyon in Norway but we got there and found out it had been closed for the season a couple days earlier. So we didn't see the canyon but we ended up having fun exploring and we found a lot of cool stuff including big cliffs, waterfalls, and things like that.

The next day, we got to travel to Tromsø!! Tromsø is the biggest city within thousands of kilometers of our little town up here, and this was my first time being there. We got to have our first in-person district council since I first moved up to Alta, and then we went on splits with the missionaries there. Splits was fun and it was cool to do missionary work in a decently big city for the first time in a while. I absolutely love Alta but it's definitely nice to get out every once in a while!

When President Tew came up to Alta to visit us about a month ago, he suggested getting involved in community activities to get a chance to talk to more people here. So Elder Memmott and I looked on the community website and saw that people get together twice a week to play basketball at the university gym, so Elder Memmott and I showed up to that and it was super fun! We got to meet some cool fun people, and now we have some Filipino bros! 

We also saw on the website that there would be a race held in the city and it was free to participate so I went for it! It was a 6.6 km race and I actually did really well! So that was fun, and I actually ended up winning a gift card for breakfast for 2 at one of the hotels here! So this morning, we had a deilig continental breakfast before we started emailing!

Another awesome thing happened yesterday! We were in the city yesterday when we saw one of the kids that was in a class we gave a presentation to at the high school a few weeks ago. He remembered us and he is a super awesome friendly guy named Gustav. We started talking and then he suggested we sit down inside the mall and talk because it was pretty cold. So we went in and talked for a while and then he wanted to eat sushi with us so we did! We didn't talk a lot about the church, we just had a hyggelig time with him and after we ate, he actually paid for our sushi as well as his!! 

So today was a great week! I hope yall had a great week too! If I learned one thing this week, it would be that we are blessed! So count your blessings, everyone!

Uke 51: The Branch is Growing! :)

Hey dokker!

Last p-day was cool because we drove way up the west side of the Alta fjord just to go look at the big snowy mountains and explore! We found lots of cool waterfalls, washed up jellyfish, and a glacier!

On Sunday, we had a "mission conference" which is just stake conference except it's for all the little branches of the church up north that don't count as being in a stake. The conference was held in a city called Bodø that's far away from us, so we just skyped in to the meeting from the church with a few other members.

A couple of our members actually took a plane to Bodø to be at the conference in person. Linnea went with her daughter, but her son Geir stayed at home (he is the 55 year old autistic man we live with) so we have helped a lot to take care of him for the last few days.

Exciting news for us! We now have another active member in the Alta branch! A danish woman recently moved up into a tiny Sami town in our area called Kautokeino. That is awesome for us! The only bad news is that Kautokeino is 2 hours away from Alta so she wont be able to come very often. Also she just speaks Danish when she talks to us haha. It just kinda sounds like janky weird German except we can understand it.

Another highlight of the week was that we got a new car! Our previous car was getting old so a senior couple drove up from Oslo with a nice new one, and they drove our old one back to Oslo after.

 

Have a awesome week yall, vi snakkes