1-4-11

"My week has been pretty good. We were able to visit tons more families this week since we didn't have time before Christmas so i had a lot of awesome visits with families this week which was amazing! I had a blast with it. New Years was also way awesome. I wish my camera could take a better video that way i could have sent you a video. We had two other Elders at our house so we played card games all night until midnight and then we had one of the best views ever. I think i have told you that we are on the 8th floor and we have a huge window that looks over basically the entire city. In the distance it seriously looked like Tirana was being bombed and then we were right next to the center of the city where the big ones are so we had an awesome view of those. It was a fun night. On Saturday all the missionaries stay inside and clean the house so Saturday dragged on because we were inside all day. We did go outside for a little and luckily found a place that was open to eat. Literally every place is closed down the first couple of days after new years. I know from talking to some people that it is the only days off that they get all year which is just nonsense. They also have a few days break for Bajram which is the Muslim holiday but other than that most people work 7 days a week.... For my birthday i spent the morning filling up the baptismal font but we also had a district meeting so we had a cake and then we exchanged present from a Christmas exchange that we weren't able to do on Christmas so that was cool. I was also able to sneak off from filling the font for a few hours and we had an awesome lunch.

So earlier i said that my week was pretty good. It was one of the best weeks of my mission but then on Saturday night i found out that i got transfered to Shkodër and i have a lot of mixed emotions about it. I have been in Tirana my entire mission surrounded by awesome families and have gotten so close to every family here and now i have to go to Shkodër where sometimes in church it's only the 4 missionaries. I'm also not happy because they speak a completely different dialect up there. If i went up continuing to speak like i do know most people will probably understand me but it's going to take me probably 2 months to be able to understand comfortably up there. So yeah i'm not happy that i have to spend my last 6 months of my mission up there. I know that there are people everywhere that need the gospel and so i will work my butt off to do my best and hopefully i will make a difference up there...."