Second Week in Berlin-Spandau

Grant in front of the Brandenburg Gate

This was a really good week!  We found 5 new investigators which is amazing!  That is the Standard of Excellence for our mission, so we felt pretty good and we hope to find even more this week with the "He is the Gift" initiative.

This week for Pday we went to see the Brandenburg Gate and the Rathaus and the space needle thing.  We also went to this store called Saturn.  It's pretty much like Best Buy and Sears combined, it's huge.  One of the things in that store is a 20,000 Euro TV.  Yes, that number is right.  Most of the missionaries just go there and stand and look.  We all say it's better than actually being there!

The chocolate here is amazing.  They have this thing called Ritter Sport and its sooo good and its pretty cheap too.  My favorite kind is Kakaoo Mousse.  It's milk chocolate with chocolate mousse in the middle.

Everyone loves pronouncing my name and I've explained my family history to it feels like every ward member!  One of the members even said that they work with someone who has the last name Spangenberg.
  

So something I thought you should know is that I love veggies now!!!  Weird huh.. Salad is like one of my favorite foods.  Yesterday we had a vegetable stir fry and it was so good.  I literally eat everything now except fresh tomatoes.  Those are still hard for me to stomach down but hopefully I'll get over that.  One of the sisters in our district only eats bread and cheese.  She will not eat anything else so its sad when the members prepare huge wonderful meals and she says all she wants is bread and cheese!  But it's okay cause I end up eating her serving anyways haha.  They all love me cause I eat so much.  Last week we also had cucumber soup and that was amazing.  So yeah I'm finally normal now!

 So this week we went on exchanges with the zone leaders.  I was companions with Elder Bankhead, the zone leader for a day.  We spent like 2 hours helping this guy write a letter so he could have his girlfriend visit him from Ukraine.  She only knows English and he only knows a little bit of German but not enough to write.  We helped him so that was good.  Then we spent an hour finding and no one listened or they said, "No time" or "Get a job and do something with your life!"  At the very end, I felt like we should talk to this guy walking his dog.  Turns out he is actually a less active who hasn't been to church in like 20 years!  So we invited him to come to the Christmas Party and he said he would.  Although we didn't find anyone new that day we both thought it was cool that we established contact with a less active.

Wednesday, we had a little time before our appointment.  We met one Russian who dissed on our church for baptizing dead people.  We were hurrying to our appt and there was this older man and we both thought to stop and talk to him even though we would be late for our next appointment.  So we did and it turns out he really liked what we said, especially about how there are 3 parts of life.  He said he believed the exact same thing and he never met anyone that thought that besides us.  He was like ,"Can I talk with you more, I really want to hear more about your church and what you have to say?"  We said we had another appointment and asked about next week.  He said,"What works for you?"  At that point we were speechless because this never happens to us.  We made an appt for next week at a coffee shop.

                           Christmas Market in Alexander Platz

                                   Space Needle Building

                                                     Berlin Cathedral

                                                       Berlin Reichstag             

This is right by my apartment.

Spandau is essentially a dead area.  There hasn't been a baptism here for about 6 months and that was the sister's investigator, the elders is a lot longer than that.  We have 2 investigators that talk the whole time and don't let us teach anything.  They have been investigating for years and years and are not ready to take the plunge of faith to be baptized.

We had Zone Conference on Friday.  It focused on Christ and the "He is the Gift" initiative.  They gave us 400 cards and my companion and I made a goal to hand out all the cards by Christmas, which is 40 a day.  President Kosak and his wife talked about their history and how they had nothing and she visited him in the East German Army and after he got out they got married.  I'm very glad he is my mission president.  Pres. Kosak also knows more scriptures than anyone, he literally just quotes scriptures that come to his head to something that is said.

Saturday, was the Ward Christmas Party and there were a ton of non members!  It is a tradition to act out a Fairy Tale and the ward performed "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs".  It was a little different than the U.S. version but it was still great.  Sunday, we went to the Bishops house for dinner after church and it was really good.

Love,
Elder Spangenberg

Main Train Station in Berlin

    This is called a Pyramid.  Lots of people have them and they are very expensive.  This is the coolest one I've seen.  This lady's husband made it.