It literally feels like forever since I've sent out one of these. I'm not entirely certain if I've written one since I came to Bergen. Either way, it's been a while.
First a little about my new city. Bergen is the second biggest city in Norway, all the ways on the western coast. 3 blocks from the centrum is the Atlantic ocean. Bergen is famous for its giant fish market. The prices are way jacked up for tourists though, so I won't be partaking of that on my limited budget.
The dialect is crazy here! All Norwegians speak the same language....sort of. There's something like 50 different dialects and Bergensk is very different from Tønsbergsk. It took a little bit of adjusting, but I can understand just about everything now. There's some missionaries that try to pick up the dialect, but I'm going to try and stick to the Bokmål, which is the pure textbook Norwegian dialect that they speak in the capitol. My companion scared me the other day when he noticed that my accent has changed a bit, so I've been working hard on keeping my language pure the past few days haha.
There is a done of stuff to do on Mondays here. So far I've climbed two mountains (well, actually one mountain two times), and today me and 3 other missionaries went a little nuts in a Dressman, which is a giant men's formal dress store....basically missionary paradise. I managed to come away with only one tie....my companion was trying on Norwegians suits when I pried him away.
The church members here are amazing. They have a large young adults program here so there's always a bunch of activities. Bergen is a huge university city and most of the people we end up teaching fall into that age group, so it makes it easy to invite them to cool stuff. Once a week we have a bible class, sport night, movie/game night, etc. We don't go to EVERY activity as missionaries, but most of them. It's pretty fun.
Besides my companion and I, there are 8 other missionaries here in Bergen...including Sister Ray who was in the MTC with me back in March. So that was a fun little reunion. It's a lot of fun when the district (all 10 missionaries) gets together, we have a ton of fun.
I've talked a lot about fun things. I promise we do work as well =) But we manage to have fun with that as well haha. I sent home pictures last week of my companion and I teaching in the Bergen centrum. We had drawn out the Plan of Salvation in chalk in the middle of the busy centrum, and then we would walk people through it. It was crazy fun, and it was a nice change from just walking around all day. The thing with a big city is there is always a lot of people around and always a lot of people moving in and out of the teaching pool. The trick is getting one of the many people we meet to stick around. So I'll let you know how that goes =)
Havin a blast in Bergen!
Elder Sessions
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