Finland is an adventure, that's for sure. The people are very...reserved. That's not a surprise because we heard a lot about Finland at the MTC but yeah, it's for sure different. I still don't understand anyone. I can pick out 1 in every 7 or 8 words or so so that's good. Yesterday was my first day at church. Even though we live in Kuopio, we actually have another city called Joensuu in our area. It is our ''visiting'' city that we visit a couple of times a change. We went down there Saturday morning and we stay with the piispa (bishop) of the Joensuu branch. He and his wife are pretty funny. He speaks some english but I don't think his wife does. He liked to try and speak English to me but I responded in Finnish as best as I could. Elder Pettus does the same. It's good to speak to the members in Finnish, even if they speak English to us. The branch was a whopping 18 members, including us. It was a totally different experience but it was still good. The members are all nice and one lady even spoke nice clearly to me so I could understand. Piispa and his wife fed us so that was nice of them. Our dinner on saturday night were a slices of bread with mayonaise (how do you spell that?) meat and some sliced vegetables on top. They weren't too bad except we had no idea what some of the meat was on some of the bread. We ate it anyway, just quickly. Sunday dinner was a cheese pasta dish thing that was pretty good. They're the only Finns that we've eaten with so far. Apparently the Kuopio branch is only like 50 active members, maybe with a very high inactive rate so I don't know how often we'll be eating with them. For ourselves we just kinda make whatever. It's pretty similar to college like food but all the directions are in Finnish so I just kinda guess what they say and hope it turns out good. We drove back to Kuopio last night at like 7ish to get home by 9. It's about a 1,5 to 2 hour drive. The sun was setting as we were coming back and it was REALLY awesome looking. The sun was blood red and the sky was sweet. We got some pictures of the sky but we missed the sun. It was awesome.
As far as investigators go, we actually don't have any. There haven't been any in Kuopio for a while now so we are still looking. While we were in Joensuu, however, we tried to meet with someone we had on record in the area book. The area book said they were two guys from Afghanistan who were nice and interested. We went to check up on them but it was just one guy from Iraq this time. He was super nice and invited us in. He didn't really speak English or finnish but still let us in. He is Kurdish and Muslim. He gave us some way good juice and we tried to communicate for a bit until he decided to call his friend who speaks finnish and english. Basically his friend translated for us. We didn't really teach a lesson because of the communication barrier but he said he would like a Book of Mormon. We're going to try and find one in Kurdish, if there is one, and if not we'll get one in Arabic because he speaks that too. We'll bring that to him when we go back to Joensuu. I kinda want to focus on the inactives in Kuopio though because if there are more members, it makes missionary work that much easier, assuming the members help. Hopefully we'll be able to work with some less active members and/or find some investigators. All we can do is contact and tract and call people. We'll see what happens.
I'm still getting into the swing of things. I've pretty much got the schedule down, I'm obviously still working on my Finnish and I'm getting a better feel of when/how to talk to people. That's one thing I wasn't sure about and am still trying to figure out. I'm still somewhat unsure of who we're supposed to talk to and how many people we're supposed to talk to and how many hours a day we're supposed to do tracting/contacting. The first half of the day is scheduled study time so that's fine. So I'm still getting a feel for what is considered a great day of missionary work. Hopefully after a few more days it'll become clearer. We spend several hours a day tracting and contacting and such but maybe it's just different because we don't have any investigators. Only time will tell how things go I guess.
Temperature wise it's pretty nice here. It's getting cooler but it's not bad at all yet. It rained all day yesterday in Joensuu but other than that it's just been overcast, like in Seattle.
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