Chapter 13: Happy New Year!! Here comes the sun...... and the cold!

 Tuesday January 2, 2024

Alright so this week has been nuts, we went on splits this week with the Zone leaders in Tampere which was super fun, it's always good in Tampere because so many people will stop and talk to you haha, so it's a good time, although the biggest "WHAT" moment came from this girl named Tina, she was the most perfect street contacting you could ever think of, literally the nicest and most genuine girl ever, she's from Thailand and she was only here visiting her sister but she told us how she would love to learn about our church, she said how she had tons of friends in our church back home and she's gone to the temple and she thought it was cool, and you can just tell she was being super genuine that entire time.  So at the end of it all we gave her our number and asked her to text us when she gets the chance and if it's ok if we give her number to the Missionaries over in Thailand so they could teach her, and she was genuinely interested and said yes, Elder Rawlings who was my split comp at the time also invited her to church the next day which was cool, idk what happened with that and if she ever came but anyways, but anyways she actually texts us like not even an hour later, and me and Vanhin Rawlings were just in shock from what we saw, her profile picture on whatsup was what we would call a very sus image😂, so it sucks because she was an amazing person but when we give the referral over to the missionaries in Thailand that profile picture is going to be the first thing they see and idk how they're going to react to it, but I hope they go ahead and try to teach her because she's epic.  So later in the day me and Elder Rawlings had the opportunity to go and show a man named Abraham our church in Tampere which by the way is the biggest church I've ever seen except for the new York one which is also a temple lol, it legit has 4 stories and is a pretty good size per floor.  So he's Muslim but is really curious about our church and so he wanted us to give him a tour and talk about our church with him, so me and Rawlings did that and it was good and we had a great discussion about our religions.  We invited him to church the next day and I'm pretty sure he came which is epic!  The guy asked some really good questions and our churches stances on certain things so that was really good practice, later me Torg and the other 2 missionaries made American pancakes which was goated because American pancakes are better. Ok and now i'm talking about the most goated place in Finland.... HYVINKÄÄ 🥳🥳 So before all of this splits stuff, me and Torg went over to this members house, there's honestly too much to talk about, I was by far my favorite lesson I've given yet, but in the beginning me and the guy were just mad heeling out about fantasy stuff because the guys a D&D player and he had an upcoming campaign the text day and he 3d prints all of these cool action figures out and paints them, he has this pool table sized arena able that he built himself since he's the dungeon master of his group and man was it so cool, so ya me and him were geeking for a while ngl.  The actually lesson was amazing itself and ya idk what else to say about that.  New years was so cool, we went over to this Italian guy and his Finnish wife's house and it was in English since the husband doesn't speak Finnish, so that was my first all English lesson which was cool.  We also got to watch the New Youth music video thing which by the way was filmed in Finland this year, and I knew almost everyone in the video because half of them are from Hyvinkää and I've met with them including one of the main peopel.at the end who was the daughter of the family whose house we were at while watching it, they had another daughter whose going on there mission in January to Toronto Canada which is based.  OH CRAP OK BIG NEWS!  So you know the guy Aatos I talk about sometimes, the Finn who's coming to Finland for his mission, ya so his brother Alvar ALSO just got called to Finland so like AHHHH LETS GOOOOO, they literally come into the mission field 1 month apart from each other which is really funny and I can't wait to have Alvar join us too!  ALSO I FOUND OUT THAT MUUMI HAS ITS OWN SODA AND ITS THE BEST SODA EVER AND NO ONE CAN EVER SAY I'M WRONG.  So news came around and hit me like a truck, so normally I only wore two sweaters outside while street contacting because -10C honestly isn't that bad, but Hyvinkää and 2024 decides to wreck me by DOUBLING in temperature, so it went from -10 to right now -21 and it's not even the coldest part of the day, also did I mention the amount of wind were getting?  It's crazy, so now I literally wore 7 layers of clothes, those being my gs, compression shirt, white shirt, sweater, another sweater, windbreaker, and jacket, now to be fair I was actually too hot in that stuff and was sweating but like whatever, but idk what's going on because like today I literally was walking around in my p day clothes with my gs, compression shirt, and my one thin white sweater thing, idk what to call it but my favorite shirt if you guys know what that is.  Also this brings me to a big point, compression shirts save lives, literally those things keep me the warmest out of everything I wear besides my gigantic helly hanson jacket obviously AND YOU LOOK EPIC WHILE WEARING IT, so I petition everyone to buy compression shirts for the cold because they keep you warm and its epic.  So another cool thing is the sun is out now a lot more despite the intense cold which leads to some epic pictures yall will see when I'm done with this email, the pictures don't do it justice but the sun with the snow make the snow like purple and blue, it's super cool.  So the downside of the cold is that no one is on the streets anymore, me and torg street contacted for 5 hours yesterday and only ran into maybe 20 people, and that's a big maybe, honestly I think a little over 10 like maybe 12, it was bad.  However I want to let you all know that my spirits are still high and I haven't in the east bit gotten sad or anything yet, Finland is still the greatest place on earth and always will be (Mainly Hyvinkää).  The cold isn't bothering me too much so that's based, I have the power of the Arizona Sun on my side! 


Let me know how all. If you are doing for new years! I'll talk to you guys next week!










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