29 Nov. 2015

Well, this week was pretty exciting. Not much happened until Wednesday, when I got the best news I've had all month: My FRO paperwork went through! I left Thursday morning, and had a fairly uneventful time. Hyderabad is hotter than Rajahmundry in the day, but gets amazingly cool at night. Anyway, Thursday night turned out to be extra surprising, because there is a certain family in our ward, the Cobb family. The father is a rice breeder who works here, who just moved in from America. They had a huge Thanksgiving dinner and invited all of the missionaries! That was my first time having real American food since June, and it was good. We had all of the standard Thanksgiving fare: turkey, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and of course four different pies. It was amazing! And yes, we are still working through all of the leftovers. Later on in the week, we've been trying to learn the ward. Elder Campbell just came from the states two months ago, and has only been in the area for a transfer. Neither of us know where anything is, so we've been going on lots of member exchanges to try to learn the area. So far things have been going well, though. Apart from those things, not too much happened; just lots of finding. However, things will be good today: Hyderabad has lots of malls and places to shop, so I'll be poking around. That is, if I can get registered today. I really don't know what will happen there.

The FRO is more properly called the FRRO, but I still don't know what it stands for. It's something about foreigner registration, and is kind of annoying. All foreigners who'll stay in India have to register at their local FRO, which is always a process. To move, they also have to deregister, which sometimes takes longer than registering. Makes sense, right?

 

This week, my letter is short because not too much happened. We did have an adventure this week, that I forgot to mention. On Saturday, we went all the way over to Charminar, which is a very Muslim area, because a member invited us to her school. There, Elder Campbell, who was studying to be an aeronautical engineer, taught some of the kids about it. While he was doing that, the teacher asked if I would talk to the other children about school. This was the first I'd heard about me teaching anything, and so caused a bit of panic. I ended up talking to all of them about random things. Whenever I got close to making a point about something, the teacher's husband would chime in with a only marginally related conversation and totally pull everyone's minds off of what I was saying, and ruined the point I was trying to make. It was pretty funny, though: he scolded them hard about discipline, studies, and everything else under the sun. Here, the educational system is crazy anyway. While you are in college, you can't do anything else but study 12 hours a day, minimum. You're too busy to have a social life or do anything, you just study. Everyone puts themselves through it, and I can't imagine how. As for pictures, that's mostly because I keep forgetting to take them. I'll do better about that from now on, though. Also, another thing I keep forgetting to mention is Christmas. The only present you can really send is music, which I'd love to get. Can you send the Christmas albums from some LDS artists? Thanks!