Kjære familie og venner

Well, we decided to take our prep day on Wednesday this past week instead of Monday, so that we could visit some museums which, for some reason, are not open on Mondays. We bought a city pass for 270 kroner and then headed out to hit as many of them as we could. In all we visited 4 museums: the Kon Tiki museum, the Fram museum, the Viking Ship museum, and a Technology museum. They were all pretty cool. 

The Kon Tiki was the name of a raft that 5 college students built according to ancient South American customs. They then left from Peru and headed west on the Pacific ocean eventually drifting to one of the Pacific islands. They did this to prove that people from ancient South America could have left on one of their water craft and populated the islands in the Pacific. Most people thought they were crazy and that they would starve to death before they got there, or that they wouldn't drift in the right direction at all, but after 101 days of open ocean they made it there. Pretty interesting, and it's cool because in the Book of Mormon it talks about a group of people left from the mainland population and embarked out on the ocean. It doesn't say where they ended up or anything like that, but many people have theorized that they went to the Pacific islands. Kon Tiki proved that it was possible =)

The Fram was the name of a ship that was specially built to travel all the ways to the North pole and all the ways to the South pole. It did, in fact, make it. They had the original ship in the museum that you could go on board and see how the men on the ship lived. So that was a pretty cool museum too. The Viking Ship museum has three ancient viking ships which have been excavated in Norway. Kinda straightforward, but it made for a nice picture, which I sent home =P 

Then, the technology museum was the coolest of all. It was kinda like the science museum I went to in Trondheim, except bigger. There was a bunch of things you could do there, a lot of hands on science stuff. I dunno, I just like to go to those kinds of museums, I could spend all day there haha. They have those balls with the electricity in them that you can touch and the little bolt of lightning goes towards your hand. Just cool stuff like that...

But anyways, that was P day. I promise I did some work this week too haha.

I decided to revive my member plan that I used when I was in Bergen and to expand on it a little bit. I was looking at some of the investigators in my district and I realized that almost all of the investigators in all of the areas being taught right now have come from referrals. So I decided that it's probably a good place to focus on. I typed up the plan and showed it to our bishop yesterday and he said he liked it. We're basically going to start visiting members and teaching them the missionary lessons. It will help us to get to know the members a bit and get some feedback on our teaching and language skills. The members can see how we tend to teach investigators and offer suggestions on what other members we could visit and stuff like that. By starting with just a few families in the ward, we will hopefully end up meeting with a lot of the members, both active and less active. It'll give us lots of opportunities to ask about people to teach. So I'm pretty excited about that, we should have a busy week.

We did have 3 people in church yesterday. One of them was a friend to the guy who the sister missionaries baptized on Saturday. He came to the baptism and I talked to him afterwards and invited him to church. I dunno how interested he actually was, but he came to church at least and I was able to give him a Book of Mormon. Another one is a Hungarian guy who has been coming to church for a while. We're working with some missionaries in Hungary to help us teach him, because he doesn't speak any English or Norwegian. The third one was a norwegian girl named Benedicte. She was a foreign exchange student in Las Vegas...actually in my trainer, Elder Davis' ward. Elder Davis' parents were here this weekend to pick him up and take him home, and they brought her with them to church. She hadn't been to church in Norway before, but she had visited the church a lot with her host family in Las Vegas. So hopefully we're going to start teaching her this week. We invited her to a YSA activity tonight, we'll see if she comes =)

That's pretty much what we're doing right now. The weather is treating us pretty nicely right now, it's pretty stable between 65-70 degrees. Sometimes it rains, but we get plenty of sun too, so that's good. It's going to start cooling down by the end of this month though. Heading into my second winter...I've heard rumors it's gonna be a nasty one haha. Should be exciting. It also means that vacation season is almost over. People have started coming home and we had a lot of people in church yesterday. The most I've seen since I've been here. I think school starts in about 2 weeks so that's when things will really start rolling again....at least until winter hits haha.

Hope you guys like the pictures. I had fun taking them =)

Elder Sessions