Week 2, leaving the 'bubble'.

Sziasztok!

So we just finished week 2 and plenty happened this week.

We taught our "investigator" Péter 3 times this week. They got better and better each time that we taught him, we even tried committing him to baptism in one of the lessons, but that didn't go so well. Our teaching and Hungarian skills are really coming along though, my companion and I even taught without using a script in our last lesson, which we thought was pretty crazy. Then what do you know Péter actually did turn out to be our new teacher, but he's pretty good, so we're looking forward to more lessons with him.

We had our tuesday devotional and it was absolutely incredible, we had Elder Rasband come and speak to us and he had a Q&A with us about the talk that he gave in 2010 where he talked about assigning missionaries. It was fantastic to hear from one of the men who assigns the missionaries of how sacred and spiritual of an experience it is for him when does it.

My companion and I got to leave the bubble a few times this week, between temple and doctors appointments for his broken arm we got to leave 4 days this week, which was pretty cool.

Funny story, so last week when we went to the temple, they have a rack where you put your jackets before you go in and get changed, then when we all came out, my jacket wasn't on the rack! It was stolen!  Name tag and all! So I had to walk back from the temple in the freezing cold with no jacket, but eventually the temple got it back the next day so I went and picked it up and all was well. Crazy story though, plenty of jokes too.

I finally found Sister Capin on Thursday and it turns out that we have the same meal time so we've been seeing plenty of each other for the last couple days. It's great to finally have an Australian around in this sea of Americans.

The rest of the week was pretty chill, mostly just study and stuff, so that's pretty much all I've got for today.

Love you all!

Bye!

PS. Here are some pictures, the first one is my district at the temple, then My companion and I with Sister Capin and her companion.

Sziasztok, I made it !

Apparently this didn't send last week so here it is again!

Sziasztok! (Hello)

So the first week at the MTC is coming to a close and I can honestly say that I'm loving it here, it's such a great experience. There are so many opportunities to feel the spirit so strongly!

I've had the opportunity to attend 2 devotionals at the MTC so far, one with Elder Dube of the Seventy and Richard Heaton who is a missionary coordinator here, they were both fantastic experiences to hear fantastic talks from the leadership. There's talks that tomorrows devotional might be an apostle (probably Elder Rasband), so that's exciting!

My companion is Robinson Elder from Layton, Utah. He's great and we get along super well. My whole district is great, there's 10 of us (7 elders and 3 sisters), and we're all really good friends already. The zone is also super cool, I got to know our Zone leaders on the first day because they took me along with them and they're great. They're going to the Adriatic south mission, speaking Albanian. We also have the missionaries going to Holland, speaking Dutch, and this week we're getting some elders who are going to Turkey. So there's a crazy mix of languages when we sing in Sacrament meeting.

So we got to start learning Hungarian straight away and we taught our first "investigator" (we're pretty sure they're going to be our next teacher) in Hungarian on Friday. Our lesson went about as well as you could expect from two elders who had only been learning Hungarian for three days. The language is coming along pretty well now though, we've learnt how to pray already and we can say a pretty basic testimony. Next thing is to learn the purpose in Hungarian! But I can really see the hand of the Lord as he helps me to learn this language.

We get a lot of time to do study here, most days have at least 3-4 hours of personal/companion/language study and it's great when we can actually keep focused (or awake) but even when we get distracted it's a good time to get to know our district.

We got to go to the temple today, which was awesome. The Provo temple is huge and they do so many sessions, so it was cool to get to do a session at one of the huge Utah temples. I get to go to Temple square friday week as well, which I'm also really looking forward to.

The food here is okay, it's your classic American food, so I'll get by but it's not the greatest. I can see why a lot of missionaries get sick of it pretty quickly.

Anyway I'm looking forward to continuing on with my MTC experience, it's great, and I'm looking forward to getting out in the field even more.

Bye!

PS. This is my mailing address, in case you needed it for anything, also if you use Dear Elder then you can send me letters and stuff through that so I get them like straight away instead of having to wait until email day.

Elder Joshua Thomas McKim
APR12  HUN-BUD
2005 N 900 E Unit 135
Provo UT 84602