Loving it in Lelystad

It's so good to hear from you guys each week and to hear about life back home. It sounds like you guys are having a great time! It's so cool about family history too! It's really cool that you bring Melinda places now too :) I love hearing about life back home. It's been such a busy week and I love it. The work is great and my Dutch is getting a little better. I'm learning to love the work and love the people. The first week I got here I was really tired all the time and nervous to knock on doors and talk to people, but now I love it. I'm still tired all the time, but I love it anyway.

We are teaching a lady from Croatia in English right now and we are teaching a lot of other people in Dutch. Naomi and Jos are people we are teaching who are really interested and missionaries have been teaching them for a long time. We have been doing a ton of service for a lot of nonmembers and members. We are winterizing lots of members’ yards and there are huge spiders everywhere in Holland!! There are tons of them.

The food is really good here. Even the cheap stuff is really good and fresh. The sisters in Lelystad brought over crêpes today because it's Elder Warner’s Birthday today! He is now 20 years old. He's awesome. He's really smart and his mother was born in Nederland. He has a lot of family here and speaks really good Dutch. I've learned so much these past two weeks and I love it here. We talk to so many people each day. While we were doing service one day, a surfer guy came up to us and told us that what we were doing was really cool. We talked to him for a bit and we're going over his house tonight to talk with him about God! Missionary work is the best and life is really good. A lot of people we talk to aren't interested but we've had really interesting conversations anyway. I can understand Dutch better than I can speak it.

You'll have to tell me where the statue of Johan de Witt is, so I can get a picture. A lot of people ask me if I'm Dutch because of my name, but they all say there is an extra T at the end of my name. They say that is how people from Belgium would spell it. It's also really funny because whenever I tell people I'm from America, they look really surprised and think I'm from somewhere in Europe :) Kinda cool. I got my bike this week! My companion is also really interested in your conversion story and thinks you guys are really awesome. Here are some pics! Love you guys sooo much! We found a cool half pipe this week. I don’t know if I sent you a picture of the view from outside of my apartment last week. I'll take more pictures this week for you guys. I also had herring! It tasted like raw fish and it was really squishy. We also eat a lot of rice and chicken, and a lot of vegetables are incorporated with the meals here.