Elder Spangenberg Berlin Mission Oct 2014 to Oct 2016 : Rainbows and a Train Museum!

Yes, I drink carbonated water here a lot now. I actually really like it. At first, I almost puked drinking it, but now I love it!
We went to a small village in our area this week to visit some contacts, but it took over an hour to get there. As we were walking to catch our bus, we heard some girls saying, "Hey." We didn't know they were talking to us but then they said, "Missionaries!" So we turned around and come to find out, they had both been in Utah for an exchange and their families were Mormon, so they already knew about the church! They want to invite us over for dinner with their families one night. We think there is definitely potential there. So that was new and exciting this week.

Our investigators, the Memetovich family, still aren't keeping their commitments. It is really frustrating. We had a great lesson with one of our recently returned missionaries in the ward. During that, Memet said he would read for 10 minutes a day and he still doesn't do it. Me and my companion have kind of hit a wall with them, it's pretty much to the point where we have done all that we can and now it's up to them.

We met with a less active this week too, and she came to church as well. She is making really good progress so that's great.

I don't know if everyone has been seeing the news, but there are a ton of refugees coming here in the next couple of weeks. It is really sad. They can't work, all they do is just sit around all day. Apparently there are 800,000 coming. So yeah, it's about to get packed. Germany doesn't deny anyone that comes from a country at war like Syria. The ones from Syria are guaranteed to stay here 3 years, but since so many are coming from war countries, the other ones like Serbia, they are not accepting anymore. Also they want to live their old lives here in Germany. So they still wear their Muslim dress and have a different view of women. There was a story about that recently, some Muslim men not listening to what a German Police Women said to them. So there are many problems that go with it. We aren't really allowed to do anything as missionaries. We see the camps for them all the time. I think Hamburg has more refugees than any other city I believe. It is a port city.

Sunday we went over to another family who has also the biggest baby ever. This baby is 16kg which is 35 pounds and he turned 1 yesterday. Talk about a future football player! The ward is really nice, I will miss all of the eating appointments if I get transferred.

We also went around with the Spanish Elders this week. They have a really tough job, they can't teach anyone in German, only Spanish, so they pretty much just go dooring the whole day, only looking for people that speak Spanish!

Transfer calls are this week. This time I think I am leaving, I hope you have a great week!

Elder Spangenberg

Look at the name on the Box!

Typical German houses in the background!

For Pday we went to the Biggest Model Railway Museum in the World. It was really cool. I thought you would like to see the photos. Logan and Lincoln would have loved it, it was literally incredible!