Week 10

Hey everyone your talking to an official citizen of Pardubice.. we got bus passes! That was pretty exciting. Hope everyones doing well. sounds like the halloween party was a success. dobra praca rachael and aaron. 

only been a few days since i last emailed but monday is our real pday. it should start getting more regular from now on. First off.. Slavek.. We started teaching him my my first couple days here. He wants to get baptized. BOOM. Not really sure about him yet because hes a little out there but we just got to keep preparing him. A few lessons ago he started asking us questions with a vocabulary I am not the slightest bit familiar with, but I kept hearing the word "revolver" in between words like kill and die. I started to sweat in my chair a little coming up with a plan to disarm him and put him in a headlock or whatever. I asked sister frampton about it after and it was all hypothetical. no worries family. He also is sort of in love with my companion. we had cenek explain to him about us being missionaries and everything. what would we do without cenek. 

We had 3 investigators come to church with us this sunday! slavek jonht and jiri. And then cenek and pavel to of the members ride the train with us so sestra frampton and i had our little possy on the train. Jiri is also awesome. he sort looks sketchy because he wears sunglasses all the time and never stops talking about conspiracy stuff. In our first lesson I asked him to read a scripture, little did i know he wears glasses because he's mostly blind! So yes I asked a blind man to read. We had a nice chat on the way to church so I think he has forgiven me for making him read with half an eye. I love how people here when you ask how they are doing a lot of them will say AWFUL. so straightforward. so jiri always says he's spatny and we always ask if we can do anything for him. But on the way to church yesterday i finally just straight up asked him .. jiri, why are you always so spatny. basically the "judges" are taking away his business/house/money which sort of explains it. also proves his sketchyness. he's awesome

theres this one guy lukas who we have been teaching and he is an english teacher. he is THE most fickle person I have ever met in my life. Its hilarious when he takes us to eat dinner we go to like 10 restuarants before he can decide. gotta love him still. even though he frustrates the heck out of me he's pretty hilarious. Last week though! it was so exciting we didn't even need to ask him about the book of mormon he just whipped it out and got really excited about it. its awesome when people finally start reading the book of mormon. you can tell so easily when they do its like night and day.

we went contacting on saturday and pardubice was literally dead. we couldnt figure out where everyone goes on saturdays. No one is home. No one is walking around and all the stores are closed. we basically just talked to drunk people laying on the street. 

JONHT. he's a homeless romanian gypsy dude. we cant understand a word from each other so usually we just let him read the romanian book of mormon aloud and we follow along in ours. on sundays he comes with us to church and then skypes with the romanian elders at the bells house after. always always it ends in jonht storming out yelling at us in romanian becuase he wants us to buy him a ticket back to romania/get him a job. crazy dude. sister frampton gets MAD at jonht its kind of fun to watch. 

i made grandma hollands cookies and brought them to members houses. they were ok but not great. our oven doesnt have temperature and they dont have real vanilla or brown sugar here so they were a little funky but not too bad. i had kofola, kenedliky, svickova all the good stuff this week. yum. i actually had my fist svickova like 30 minutes ago.. i ate the whole thing and seriously impressed a lot of people. 

not much else has happened. oh ya an old lady spiked our drinks yesterday and beardy old ladies keep trying to kiss me on the lips. so far no one has got me. booya.

Love you. miss you. stay awesome

sestra holland

It's getting cold!

Week 9

FAMILY. sorry it has been so long. On our pday we went to Brno for training. Sounds like you've heard, I am in Pardubice! I love it here. The people are amazing and yes they are known for their gingerbread. its funny most the emails i got today said something about gingerbread. its pretty good, not amazing. Sestra Frampton and I went into a little gingerbread store and the old lady who worked their defied all the rules of being an old lady working in a gingerbread store. She was not nice.

So some crazy stuff went down since my last email so I will fill in. Our visas didn't get here, I got reassigned to Independence Missouri, our visas came, our flight got cancelled, we spent the day in the airport, we got a flight, and made it to Prague pretty late. Man were we tired but we made it and its a miracle!

That first night in Prague we went to McDonalds and President McConkie gave us each some money to go buy some dinner. He told us what to say and everything and I so i went up and asked for a "number 4" which were the chicken nuggs, but i guess they don't say that here. so they just gave me 4 cheeseburgers it was pretty funny. i guess the word for number sounds like cheeseburger.. we all had a good laugh about it.

My companions name is sister Frampton. She is awesome. i seriously respect trainers.. its got to be hard to put up with us greenies. We are having a good time here in Pardubice. We are the only missionaries here- the rest of district is in Hradec Králové where we take the train to go to church everysunday. Love my district.We went to Brno together and played czech Bang! One of the elders looks and acts just like alex its crazy. I played hockey with his older brother Tim at BYU last year too. The senior couple in our district are the Bells. They are the best. We had lunch with them on Sunday after church. love them 

So, pardubice. Loving it. The people here are amazing. čeněk is our favorite. He got baptized 2 weeks ago so before I got here. Probably the most solid member I've ever met. He comes to English, family history everything. If all else fails čeněk is there. He's awesome. He's trying to get ready to go on a mission so we have him teach us a lot of the lessons to practice. Sestra Kunčikova is a member here. She reminds me of Grandma Holland. She sent us away with half her pantry and a quarter of her fridge. It was awesome. Sestra Knižková is another lady I met this week. We drove out with Bells becuase she lives out of the city. She's not super active right now but just the sweetest lady. Simona and Jarda, that was a funny experience. They live in a serious dump.. my companion didn't even prepare me for what I was about to see. They closed all there doors to their kitchen and basically hotboxed us for a good 45 minutes. My lungs were about to collapse. The funniest part was when she gave us tea, i was going to follow my companions lead- so i watched her carefully to see if she would drink it.. they don't have running water in their house so i wasn't sure if it was in the clear to drink. so she doesn't touch her tea the whole lesson and right before we are about to say the prayer and leave I look over and she had just chugged it down. I said a little prayer and chugged that nasty liquid best i could. Definitely wasn't tea. we have another lesson with them tomorrow i'm looking forward too. Another funny story this week when contacting we told a man we were missionaries for the church of jesus christ. He said "I am a missionary too, but for satan." we tried to be serious at the time but we were laughing pretty hard after.

Love this country. It's awesome.

That's I'll I've got today. Just know I'm doing well. Happy as a clam.

Happy Birthday Rachael!! Have a good one!

Love,

Sestra Holland

train to brno

lunch at the bells

when sister holland gets a hold of dinner.. i ate the whole block of cheese in one night.. SO GOOD

MTC Week 8

We are breaking out of this place! Monday is the day. We got our flight plans on Saturday and boy was that a good day. We fly to Fort worth Texas, then London Heathrow then Prague. We got a letter from our mission telling us what will happen when we get there. When we land we go on our "Prague Walk" and the mission president talks about some important church history in the Czech Republic. Then we go eat some dinner and stay the night there. The next day we go do a few things for our visas, meet our companions and we are off. Pretty great. 

This week we had General Conference. That was the stuff. Most relaxing weekend i've had in a while too. we just got to watch awesome talks all day. If any of you went to/saw the Priesthood session my starší made the big screen like 5 times! basically all the faces you saw were my zone. All the sisters went to watch it in our room and we were all getting excited when we say the elders in our zone get camera time. 

Hope your General Conference trip went well mom and dad. That's gotta be a lot of work luggin all those kids around Utah. I remember when I did that though and won't forget it. It's a good experience. I heard conbon was waiting for me at the gate. So close yet so far.. I had my eye out for all of you. I was running around the field Friday evening for gym time looking in all the cars that passed by. I'll be calling though this Monday morning from the airport! can't wait to talk to all of you.

Sunday night after devotional Vai Sikahema from the Greenbay Packers came and spoke to us at a devotional. Now he's an anchorman on some sports news channel. He is hilarious and gave us some good advice. We also got to host yesterday .. finally! its when you pick up the new missionaries at the curb and take them to their residence and classroom. our whole zone did it except for us like the 2nd week here and we recently found out we were supposed to too but they forgot to put the notice in our mailbox. so we marched in there and told them "we are hosting!" took a few times doing that before they let us and it wasn't that great anyways. I didn't get to pick up from the curb because i was selected to direct a foreign missionary who doesn't speak our language. the honor. It was hilarious. She was from Africa and super spunky. When we walked all around campus getting her books and getting her set up she kept walking into me. Literally leaning on me. So i would give myself some space and then she would walk right next to me again and the process continued. vtip. when i left her (after not even an hour) i swear she was about to cry. Sweetest girl. she told me about Mozambic (..sp?) with the english she had. She was like deer in the headlights poor girl. I thought my life changed when I came to the MTC but serious props to sestra johanna. she might be my new favorite person. 

Then last night they sent a letter to Sister Fredrickson and I asking us to begin teaching an investigator for the new missionaries. Remember my first email when I told you about Junichi and how a hundred or so of us missionaries had a lesson in the auditorium. Well they have two missionaries come get to know them first and then they turn it over to the auditorium and sister fred and i got to do it! They got us all mic'd up and it was pretty fun. Going to miss sestra Fred. Some good times we've had. 

Well things are wrapping up here and it's going to be a little adventure coming soon. Not sure if my czech is quite worthy but ready or not here I come. 

Love,

Sestra Holland

MTC Week 7

Hi everybody! 

This week was a little overwhelming but good. My district is starting to get nervous. 11 days until we leave for the Czech Republic. This language, man. I don't think we will ever be ready in the MTC. We just have to get there and start using it. Most of us feel like we are "plateauing" a little bit so Bratr Mullen made us all sign a český kompact in which we promise to "adhere to the principles of SYL (speak your language) like we never have before, both in and out of class.. I hereby pledge to do so by signature.." and then we all signed it with fancy signatures it was pretty funny. 

We got a new teacher this week. SESTRA Donaldson! She is so cute and an awesome učitela. She told us about the 8 cities they send the sisters to. 

Praha

česke budějovice

plzen

ostrava

mlada boleslav (which is only sister missionaries)

vhereske hradiště 

brno 

and hradec kralove

She is super tall and cute and we just love her. 

We started teaching our new "investigator" Aleš (Bratr Knapp) and the lesson is right after Martin's so it didn't go to well. it's been a long time since we started from square one so it was good practice. all because honza left us. Bratr thompson is officially gone (tear). I know I talked about him leaving last Thursday but that night after our little toast with mountain dew he gave a cool analogy about "getting out of the river" when we are on our mission - the river being our normal lives. And if we try to stand outside of the river with one foot in it we are going to fall in and not take full advantage of this time to be out of the "river". missing those wise words of bratr thompson

We got another half our zone this week to replace the Croatians, Slovenians, Bosnian and all them. They are a good group. We got to skype someone from Czech Republic! Her name is Alex and she is living in Praha. ALEX she is from Russia! When we asked her to read a scripture she read it in russian and it is pretty darn close. Alex and I are going to have a secret language when we get home. Watch out. 

We get our flight plans in 2 days!!! Just praying I got my visa. 

OH. and madison young if you are reading this you dropped a bomb with no return address! Email it to me! 

Love you all and miss you

Sestra Holland