Questions and Answers...and a grumpy old man!

Hello Family!!!!

This last weeks been pretty good. The weeks are going by faster and faster. In just 2 weeks my first transfer will be over (in most other missions, transfers are just 6 weeks, but ours are 9). Which means in a week in half I should be receiving a phone call to find out what's going down for the next 9 weeks. I would be really surprised if I moved out of Karlovac. But who knows?

That's pretty exciting about the new bishopric....especially for Bishop/Brother Woodland....oooohhh....that's so weird.......Everything is going to be so different when I get home. That's the weirdest part. It's only been like 4 months.  And that's way cool about Spencer. I hadn't heard about that. Tell him I said congrats! Is it English speaking in Tucson? And Mollie looks like she made a good haul. Is the Sony stereo dock thing the thing she was saving for? She didn't e-mail me this week. And I’m glad I’m half the world a way to avoid the mental destruction that watching people play that dumb dance game causes. That's cool about your room. Y'all are gettin' too fancy for me. I won't be able to live there any more when I get back because I won’t fit in.

So ya....have I said that this week has been average? It's heated up a bunch. It started off being in the high 40's low 50's and rainy, and now it's humid 80's and super sunny. It's SOOOOO HOT! Especially since no one has air conditioning....including us. So the apartment doesn't cool off much at all. We're hopefully gonna buy some fans this week. But the joke is that during the winter you can’t get the Croats to take clothes off and during the summer you can’t get them to put clothes on. It's kind of gross when a man opens the door without pants on....just his briefs and a t shirt...or just a towel...... blech. A little disturbing. And people, especially little kids, have no problem with public urination here. They just whip it out, go, and go back to playing in the park. So don’t roll around in the grass.

 Albania would be okay....As long as you end up in Montenegro or Macedonia. It's kind of interesting. Montenegro speaks "Montenegrin (SP?)" but it is really just Serbo-Croatian with a twist, but for some reason it's not in the mission with Serbo-Croatian speakers. They stuck it in the south with the Albanian speakers. It just doesn't make much sense to me, but oh well.

They're haven't been any super funny stories this week, so I'm at a little loss. Oh....one thing. I bought an external hard drive today to store pictures on. Here's why: The computers are super ghetto and slow at uploading so the hard drive would be faster storage and I’m also not sure of the quality of shutter fly photos. It might just be the old monitors, but it looks like it uploads them in low quality. So I probably wont be uploading to shutterfly very much. I'll probably just be attaching some pictures if I want to send them home.

Oh one funny story....So we eat out a lot....from like maybe 4 different restaurants because Karlovac doesn't have a whole lot. Well, we eat out at least once a day usually. Most places deliver here, and delivery is always free (and people think you're dumb if you tip. They think you can't count money or you're forgetting it....it's way nice), so we either get it delivered to our apartment or the church. So when you order they ask for your address and we told the guy at Mona Lisa (one of our favorite kebob/pizza/calzone places) that the address was Tuškanova 10 (the church) and he asked what floor and we said the first floor.....now usually they would ask which business, but after we said first floor, all he said was "Ya....Church of Jesus Christ, right?" We just started laughing....I think we get it a little too much. But it's good and it's cheap.

So now I’ll answer your questions

1.  Do you know if you are calling on Saturday or Sunday for the Mother's Day Call?  We want to be sure we don't miss it.  Also, I think I'll go ahead and get a international phone card.  What is your number for me to call you on in case the Skype doesn't work?  Do you have all the Skype info you need in order to use it?  I don't have it, but Dad will.  I may have to send you out an extra e-mail with that info.

We still have a few weeks. You can wait a little bit if you want. We can talk with the Higbee's this week and finalize plans for using Skype. If we do use Skype, I’ll just log on with my username and password and call dad that way. It'll be fine.....JUST A COUPLE OF WEEKS AWAY!!!!!!!!! I wouldn't recommend buying the phone card. You might never use it.

2.  Do you guys have a cell phone or are you borrowing one?

 

We have a cell phone for our companionship (everyone does). So you would just call that one. I don't know the number, but if we end up using it, I’ll send you the number in the email, or call dad and hang up and then you can call back....I don’t know.

3. Not a question, but give me a "Mom Moment," okay?  You know…if you took those vitamins, it may help you from feeling so tired.  Just putting that out there.  Is this a normal tired or should I be concerned? 

My sleep is fine now. Everything here has just as much vitamins as everything in America. It's just that the people telling us to take the vitamins can't read Croatian, so they can’t read the labels that talks about how everything is fortified. And I was just tired for the first few weeks because of jetlag and stuff....but now I stay awake throughout the day and get excited at 10:30 when I can go to sleep. It's fine.

4.  How are your investigators doing?  

The investigators are doing well. A**** is cutting back on her smokes and her coffee. She'll be able to give them up. The problem is getting her to church. We've really drilled it in that it's important and she has to even just for baptism, but she's still never been, which is why we keep moving her baptismal date. Right now it's for May 20th, but we'll see. She understands she should go, but it's still a struggle, because she's considered herself religious her whole life, but she's never gone to church, so now it's weird for her that she has to go. It'll work out.

5.  What goes on at the Zone Conferences? 

Well technically we don’t have "zone conferences" very often. The church doesn't want them happening too often because they get expensive with all of the food and transportation, so you can only have zone conferences every other month.....so then in the months where we don’t have zone conferences, we have "specialized training meetings" which are essentially the same thing.....it just helps us get the money for them. But you go and the mission president, the zone leaders, and the assistants (along with anybody else who's asked) teach lessons about things that would help us improve our work and be more efficient and successful. It's broken up into halves with lunch in between, but you pretty much just sit and get taught for somewhere about 4 hours. It's pretty interesting. And then you take what you learn and apply it.

6.  How is a mission different from what you thought? 

I'm not really sure. I'm not sure if I had any expectations before I went, but being a missionary is different than I always pictured. It's weird to wake up in the morning, feel like P.J. and then go and put on a tag that says "Starješina Quinn". It's weird to think that all of the missionaries are just 19 and 20 year old guys that are just trying especially hard to behave themselves. Because I always imagined becoming a missionary and just becoming a different person, but for the most part, it is the same. I just wear really hot clothes and try to survive in a foreign country with a weird language.

7.  What personal changes have you noticed from being on a mission? 

For a while I thought I was getting more patient and more loving, but then an old man yelled us the other night for walking through a field because we were walking to the field to get to a building on the other side of it. He was telling us that we had to cross the street and use the sidewalk on the other side.....which is ironic, because he was standing in the field. It went like this: Boys! What do you think you're doing? You don’t walk through fields. Get to the other side of the street and use the sidewalk. And then when we told him that we were just hurrying through, he yelled at us to hurry on the sidewalk on the other side. He was super jerky and was just chewing us out.....So as I was saying, I felt loving until that happened. But then he yelled at us and I had to resist every urge in my body to just flip him off and just keep on walking.....I was so mad! First off, You know how I feel about old people....which I’ve been trying not to, because Karlovac has a lot of old people. Second, I hate people that are just rude because they think they can be.....But besides that, I think my patience has been growing....maybe. Also, not saying that I'll be different when I get home, but I really realize how much time I used to waste. Just the thought of taking naps or just watching TV or movies for hours at a time seems ridiculous. I think back and wonder "How did I ever fit all of that into my day? How did I fit that into my planner?"....oh I’m such a loser. I guess the thing that's changed the most is my mindset. It seems weird that I ever went anywhere by myself. It feels like I was breaking rules. It also seems super scandalous to think that I ever hung out with girls. It's just funny because as a missionary girls are such bad news. Oh well.....It's only been 4 months and I’m turning into an awkward missionary.

I think that's about it. It's really nice to hear from you guys every week. If anybody asks how I’m doing, tell them that if they really want to know they should write and ask me....just kidding....but you really can if you want ;). Tell everyone I said hi! Oh...and Mollie, I'm probably gonna finally ship your birthday thing today or tomorrow....it should be there in a couple of weeks. Sorry I'm lame. I love all of you bunches!

Until next Monday,

Love,

P.J.

Bullet Holes in the Shutters and a cool day-trip!

~Kind of dark...but that is Karlovac behind him!~

~I'm guessing this is supposed to be proof to me (his mother) that he is actually drinking something fortified...for once in his life... ;) ~

Sorry about last week. That was pretty lame. I was a little disappointed, but we didn’t have much of a choice here in Karlovac. So I don't know if I’ll be able to remember everything that happened inthe last 2 weeks, but I’ll hit with the big events.

So Plitvice was awesome! It's like and hour and a half bus from here, so we caught the bus at 8:20 and got there around 9:50. It was such a cool place. The water is sooooo blue and clean. I’m just used to lake Lewisville and Grapevine. I didn’t know you could have water that clean and still call it a lake. We started off by walking through the woods up above all of the water to the ferry which took us across one of the lakes, and then we took the wooden plank walkways all the way around the different falls and caves. It's a must do when you come to pick me up. I got quite a few cool pictures, but I don’t know if I have enough time to upload them today. We were there until about 4:00. It started raining right when we were leaving so we had some perfect timing.

Last Wednesday was awesome, too. We found out that we were going to Ljubljana [Slovenia] for zone conference. It is such a cool city. The drive is just so cool. There are big rolling hills everywhere just covered in trees. Everything isn’t quite green yet, but it was still awesome. Throughout the hills there are a bunch of little village towns and little churches. The coolest part was seeing the Alps on the drive in. They are absolutely huge. Utah mountains have nothing on them. I didn't get to see downtown, though, because the chapel is on the edge of town. But I can now say that I've been there. And I have the passport stamps to prove it. Now I need to get to Serbia and Bosnia. Bosnia would be so cool. Hopefully some day while I'm here. So yeah... I got to go international last week...even if it was just for a few hours.

So.... I know I’m being a little missionary-esque by just taping my suit together, but it's saving me money and I don’t even know if I can get a good suit in Karlovac. I would probably have to go up to Zagreb to get anything decent (since it's a small town here) and that would cost, too. So I'll probably just keep using the suit I have until I can no longer. But I think a suit here is somewhere around 1200 kuna or so....so like $240 or so.....but I don’t know for sure.

Those are the two big events that I can think of, so now I’ll start answering questions.

1. Any second appointments?

Eh....kind of. There's a man named E that we found when we were tracting. He's pretty unsure about what he believes and he's been trying to find a religion that makes sense to him. He's done a lot of research and is leaning towards Hinduism because he likes the idea of Karma, but he's not sure. He had heard a little about Mormons, but not a ton. So we met with him. And he has so many questions!!!!!! But the cool part is that he doesn't ask questions to be argumentative or to disprove us like most people. He just asks questions because he's curious. And he likes to talk a lot, go figure...he's a Croat. So we've met with him three times and we're gonna try and meet with him again sometime this week or next.

2. Still loving the shower?

The shower is still nice. I like it a lot, but it has lost a little bit of novelty.

4. What is your favorite scripture?

5. How goes the work?

The work is good. We have a new investigator name I*** who is a lonely old guy with health problems. He's so nice, but he has issues with health and money, that are preoccupation his time and mind. After our first lesson we prayed, and afterwards he just started crying and was pretty much speechless. After he gained control he asked us to teach him how to pray like that so he could ask for help. He's just so awesome and I feel so bad for him.

6. Are you doing okay??

I’m doing well. We walk a lot everyday and my callouses are getting big. But I’m holding up well. I’m tired all the time, but I’ll get over it.

7. Are you staying healthy?

Yup.....and I got harassed about not taking my vitamins by Sister Turner, the nurse, but oh well. I got the "foods not fortified" lecture, but all of the juice and milk that I drink says "with vitamin C and D" so I’ll be fine.....and no one else takes vitamins either and everyone's fine....and I never drank milk for calcium before my mission either.

8. How is the language coming?

The language is getting better. Just this last week I’ve started to notice how much more I’m able to say and understand. I can feel it starting to just come out naturally a little bit. Instead of thinkingand translating, sometimes I find myself just saying. It's pretty cool.

9. Miss anything from the states food-wise?

I was just talking about that yesterday to the other missionaries. I don’t think so. I miss the frozen food isle from the grocery stores back home, because it doesn't really exist here. But I’m getting by fine. Chicken Express is almost sounding good again....It sounds like I’m getting desperate for america.

10. Miss your mommy? Just kidding….

yes....tear...sniff....sniff......good thing I get to talk to you in a couple of weeks!

11. Miss your bed?? Just kidding, again.

Yeah. My queen size bed is nice for size, but it is nowhere near as soft.

12. JoJo misses you…ha! **side note....JoJo is our evil cat**

I still hate her......

So yeah. It's been a good couple of weeks. A couple of other things I forgot. We had to go and get stuff that our apartment didn’t have like an iron, broom, trash can, dish drying rack, etc......and we may or may not have spent $50 on an iron. But, then we called the office and they said it was reimbursable. So, now we have an awesome iron.

I think that's about it for this week. Oh yeah....the address for the mission home is the one on the blog....in Zagreb. That's cool about moving offices. I hope it works out all right for you.

I love you all and miss you all. I'm looking forward to Mother’s Day....p.s. In Croatia we have shutters on every window that pull down and they are pretty much black out shutters. They're awesome. We pulled down the shutters in the study room the other day and we found something interesting. I put the pictures on shutterfly.....We found a souvenir from the Serbs.....bullet holes in our apartment. Isn't that crazy? I thought it was kind of cool.

Anyways I gotta go. Talk to ya next week.

Love,

P.J.

~Bullet hole in the apartment shutter~

Moving, a baptism, and fun explorations!

~Picture from the baptism....she is pixilated for privacy reasons in case you are wondering~

To Bri [his sister]:

You're welcome for the journal....don’t feel bad. I kind of forgot that I sent it ;). That's too bad about your car.** But hopefully soon enough you'll no longer need it. I'm doing pretty good out over here. For about a week it was really warming up and getting into the high 60's, but now it's back down to the 50's. But that doesn’t stop me from going out in short sleeves and getting harassed by old people that tell me I'm going to freeze (we just look at them and say "neču: no I wont") As far as new investigators that are solid....not really. We've been so busy this last week with moving apartments (I’ll explain that in the family email) and other stuff like that we haven't had a whole lot of time for tracting. But we met a few people that we're going back to talk to this week.

So some sad news....Croats think it's incredibly barbaric and kind of white-trash/hickish to eat horse. It's mostly a Serbian thing. Most people here think it's stupid to eat horse, so I wont be trying it while I’m in the country. I’ve just been eating same stuff as usual. Wait.....you know how strict Catholics don't eat meat on Fridays...especially during Lent? Well we were at someone's house teaching her and her mother and her dad made us dinner....a potato and onion salad with olive oil and apple vinegar on top and then he pulled something fried off of the stove and told us that we had to have some. It looked alright from far away.....but then he put it down in front of me and I saw a bunch of little tentacles.........a whole plate of fried squid!!....but I ate it. It wasn’t bad with lemon squeezed on it...but it was still squid.

The language is getting better. I’m understanding more of what I read on signs and books. The listening is getting better too. I still have trouble getting the whole idea sometimes, but I can usually figure some stuff out. It's funny when we walk around and people say stuff about us or mock us and think we can’t understand them. Oh well....it happens. I better get emailing other people as well, so I’ll type to ya later.

**Bri’s car was pummeled (as was Phil’s truck) by golf-ball/baseball sized hail last week.

Hello family!

First things first. Sorry about not e-mailing yesterday. Since everyone here is "Catholic" and Easter is one of two times a year when they can show it, the whole town shuts down from Friday until Tuesday. So I had nowhere to e-mail from. When I found out that we couldn't e-mail I wasn't too upset because I figured Mom would be here the next day to kill me, so I would end up having some communication with family regardless of what happened. Don't be surprised if this is how it happens next week too because we are having a zone activity at Plitvica (the waterfall place) for the day. It was such a hard choice. I had the choice to switch with a couple of missionaries that wanted to go to Plitvica and I would go to Lake Bled instead, but I figured Plitvica would be all right. I hope I don't regret my decision. But I also figured that I'll be here for 2 years and I’ll have other opportunities to go to Bled.

So it's been such a busy week....and not even with directly missionary related things. The Hs are the senior couple that we have here in Karlovac but they've been living in Zagreb for a while trying to find a place they liked here in Karlovac. They liked where we were living at B's house, but Baka really likes the young missionaries and the Hs don't understand that they're in Europe (they wanted her to remodel stuff because they didn't like the bathroom....it's been said that they are looking for America in a small Croatian town), So she didn't want them moving in. Well, they really couldn't find anything and they really wanted our place, so we took the opportunity to look for an apartment a little bit closer to town (okay....we were pretty much politely kicked out). So we found a place in our budget (300 euros a month...our limit is 400) and I actually like it a lot better than our old place. It's closer to town so we don't have to hike up hill to get home at night. It has 2 queen sized sleeping things (they are not beds....they are wooden boxes with an inch and a half of foam on top covered in fabric, but I can spread out) and it has the best missionary apartment bathroom ever!!!!!!!!!! For starters, at B's the toilet was in a small room next to the rest of the bathroom which is traditional here, but this one has the toilet in the bathroom. And we have a giant water heater. I've been taking cold showers for the last month because we didn't have a water heater at B's that was big enough for 2 full showers, let alone 3. So now we have a giant water heater....right next to the towel warmer. Yup...we have a towel warmer on our wall like a fancy hotel. And the best part is the shower. It's like a space ship/time machine. It has an overhead rain shower, jets on the wall, a hand sprayer, and a seat with sprayers on the wall behind it. It is soooooo AWESOME!!!!!!! Showering is by far the best part of my day. It's pretty much changed my life. Now I wake up in a queen-sized bed, shower in luxury, get out and dry off with a hot towel, and get dressed and ready for the day. And when we walk out, we are pretty much in town and we don't have to walk far. We are also right next to Kaufland, the grocery store, so it's a lot easier to carry our groceries. The only downside is the kitchen is a little small and I wish we had a little bit more counter space, but other than that, I really like it.

So other than that, Elder K left last Tuesday, so we are officially a regular companionship. It's kind of weird only being with one other person, but I don't mind it.

The most exciting thing about this last week is that we had I***'s baptism. We met with her like 4 times last week just to make sure she was ready for it and she definitely was. The scariest part was when we asked her whom she wanted to baptize and confirm her. She asked Elder B to baptize her..........and me to.....confirm her. I said that I would, but honestly I was terrified. I didn't know how it was going to work out. So I memorized the standard part of it, and then I just looked up and memorized words that I thought might be useful. It was pretty funny. Whenever any of the branch members heard that I was going to confirm her, they would say "That's great....in English?" and when we said no, in Croatian..... they all had the same look of good luck..... and said, "Wow....that's great......" I don't think anyone really had too much confidence in me. But it went all right. Rather well, actually. The baptism was great though....although the font was a pain. We used the infamous portable font. This font travels around everywhere and since its creation, some elders decided that the elbow pieces that connect the corner were too hard to fit, so they threw them away. So now you have to be super careful and rig it so it doesn't fall over....even after it's full. Filling it was also a problem. The church has tiny water heaters, so we would use those until the heater was empty and then we also just constantly boiled water and poured it into the font every twenty minutes...but you can’t use all 4 burners to heat water at once. They figured that out in December when they overheated and burnt out the stove. We were at the church all Saturday just filling the font. But the baptism had a good turn out. President and Sister Rowe came down from Zagreb with a bunch of senior missionaries and a bunch of the branch showed up too....even people that I haven't seen at church before but never miss a baptism. Elder M and I taught about faith and repentance while I*** and Elder B were changing and the lesson went pretty well.

On Sunday we had the confirmation and then Elder B, Elder M, Elder C, and I did a musical number for Easter. Elder C played the piano and the rest of us sang. We sang, "Beautiful Savior" in Croatian. I think it went pretty well.

Yesterday was pretty cool. We went normal grocery shopping and then we walked a couple of miles to a store called Interspar, which is just a grocery store with a bigger selection of things other than food. We had to buy a new iron, I bought a dictionary, and we just got other odds and ends. After that, we went back to B's for an Easter Monday lunch that she made for us. It was sooooo good. She made us Sarma which is like a beef rice mixture wrapped in cabbage leaves and then boiled/baked/steamed in a soup/sauce stuff. It was awesome. Then she brought out a bunch of roasted pork on a pastry noodle dish that absorbed all of the flavors from the pork. And then she brought out cake and baklava for dessert. It was so awesome. We then helped her move furniture out of our old apartment that the Hs didn't want into the attic. Then we went out and explored the old cemetery in town and then hiked up the hill to the old castle. The cemetery was the biggest cemetery I have ever seen. It goes up the side of the hill and then it goes down the hill on the other side of the street. It's way cool. The graves here are almost all family plots and they have things raised up from the ground like tomb things. There are tons of fancy statues and just super old graves. They have it split into sections too. They have a Jewish, Orthodox, and then Catholic sections with Muslim graves sprinkled throughout. The castle was pretty cool. You can’t go inside unless you set up a group tour, which we didn't know, but you get an awesome view of Karlovac from up there so it was still worth it. And then when you go down the hill on the other side there's an old church and just some cool old buildings. It's finally starting to really green up and blossom from all of the rain recently, so it's starting to look more like the pictures you've found online.

I’m doing fine on toothpaste still and I can’t think of anything that I need. The master bedroom looks way nice. The TV and the Mac are best parts by far. I think you're gonna get too fancy for me by the time I get back home. It's kind of been hitting me how different things are here. The other day I was thinking about how big our house is. 2800 sq ft. doesn’t seem too big by America standard, but that is giant! I've seen some apartments with kitchens the size of my closet at home with a tiny bathroom off of it and then a living room with a pull out bed that’s about the same size, maybe smaller, than your master bedroom. Also, I haven't seen anyone with a dryer or dishwasher since being here. Everyone just has indoor drying racks and clotheslines on the balconies. I'm just realizing how spoiled I was back home. I had a car....that's the weirdest part. They are such a luxury here. And I had a job. The economy is pretty rough over here....especially in Karlovac. Unemployment is pretty huge, but somehow people manage to get by on so little. It just seems crazy that I had it much better off back home than over half the city here. I lived in a big house, had a job, my own car, and a dryer, dishwasher, a computer with Internet connections in my house, and multiple other things. All of those things are just so rare here...especially to have all of them.

I'm still not big on female music artists....or MoTab. I haven’t changed that much. But if it's too much of an issue, you can just not do it. I'll be fine if it's taking too much of your time.

I think that's about it for this last week. Not too much going on here ;). It's funny how much my mind has changed. Just the thought of going to the movies or just watching TV for a few hours, or even napping just seems so foreign. I'm starting to wonder how I ever found the time to put it in my schedule. When you plan out your days the night before, it really makes me see how short the days are. It's really weird. Another one that we talk about and laugh at.....It seems so scandalous that we ever hung out/socialized/went on dates with girls. It just seems so taboo now; it's hard to believe that it ever happened. Oh the things that happen to your mind when you're a missionary.

I better get movin' on. I still have to e-mail President Rowe.

Until next week,

Love,

P.J.

~The portable baptism font~

~The Awesome Shower!!~

~....turned into a time-traveling machine....~

~The new apartment~

~Kitchen in the new apartment~