First Dinner With the Young Adults

We finally have our internet at the apartment in Lille. We are thrilled that we don't have to go to church or McDonalds to get onto hotmail. We have had a good week especially last night at the institute class. Your Mom worked for two days to get the meal ready. She made 30 enchiladas, a huge salad, and chocolate cup cakes. The meal went over very well. We wanted to do more than just a main dish and so we decided on a salad with tomatoes on the side. It was just what was needed. The cup cakes were downed especially by the young men. We had a total of 19 people there and one was an amis of the church who came to family home evening also last Monday.

We are responsible for the treat on Monday night family home evening, the Thurs day night meal and the snacks for the once a month activity at the center. In Feb. they are going to have a movie night with 17 Miracles. Some pop corn might go well that night with a few other treats. We hope to have some good activities to get more friends of the church to come and enjoy some wholesome fun. This will encourage the missionaries to get a little more enthused about contacting young adults.

We are getting well established in our apartment, with only curtains on the windows left to do. We have some for the bedroom but the other two rooms are coming along. We had to do some comparison shopping before we found something that would work with our odd sized windows. The kitchen is narrow and so the place where the fridge should go is not being used because you can't get a fridge through the narrow kitchen to put it in its place. The fridge ended up in the small bedroom that is being used for an office. Some design flaws could have made the kitchen bigger, but we can live with all that.

The stake has 6 missionaries out in the field with two more to go soon. There have been also 5 temple marriages. This has put a drain on the number of young adults, but this is what the program is all about. We are going after the inactives by asking the two bishops in Lille to give us a list of their top 5 candidates for re-activation. The young adults are well organized and willing to do the work, especially when we go with them and give a little encouragement.

If you have any suggestions as to activities for this group to do, we would appreciate the families help. We are planning an Olympic Games night around the time of the London games, but it will be the wacky Olympics: straw throwing for the javelin, ping pong balls instead of the shot put, etc. If you come up with any events, let us know. There is also a stake event every two months, in conjunction with the young adult broadcast, but that is handled by the stake.

Lille is a city of about 4 million people with all of the suburbs and we haven't got the hang of the city yet. We can get from the apartment to the church and back, but as for the rest of the city it is the luck of the draw. European cities are not in the pattern of the states with square blocks. All the streets don't lead to any where, especially Rome. All the streets go at angles, even in the new parts of town. In a car if you miss the place you are looking for, you can't go around the block and come at it again. First if you miss your destination and you try to get back to it, you fall into the problem that all streets go at angles and plus the one way streets take you further away and it become impossible for someone as new as us to the city to know the key to the streets puzzle. We are becoming familiar with certain land marks but that only helps in knowing what you passed and not with knowing where you are or how to use the land marks to help you to a certain destination. The round-abouts help in some respect because we can complete the circle again if we miss our exit. There are some signs that help lead us to the main buildings and areas but we are still not good enough with the layout of the city to get us around. We do know that we live near the city government building, but one must get in the vicinity of that building to finally see the signs point in its direction.

Since there are no mountains to give you your compass directions, we tried to use tall land marks to help us. The first is the clock tower at city hall. This is a good one because it is high enough and distinguished in its design to get noticed. Second was church steeples, but we ran into a problem when we started to notice that all but one of the steeples is of the same style, so that got us lost instead of helping. We will work with the city streets until it comes together. One benefit of getting lost is that it helps us work on our patience and love.

The auto route system is well done, especially when working with a city built centuries ago. The system is well planned and the signs are very well done to help one get to where they want to go. If we took the streets to church, it would take us months to figure it out, but on the auto route we get there without any problem.

Love Mom & Dad