Guten Morgen

Hey. Today is the first real P-day I've had since I have been here in the mission field. We slept in till about 10 which seemed way late and even though I was up till 1 talking to my awesome family on the phone I woke up around 630 about 7 times cause my body is convinced that is the time to get up no matter what.

The people here are great. The members love everything we do and would do anything they can to help. They are such a great example to me. Even though they are not on missions and are in their home town they have no trouble going around with us and talking to people. They are not afraid of what people might think but instead more worried about the people and want to try and touch all of their lives. We get meal appointments every sunday after church. (even on fast sunday because for some reason some people don't fast on Sunday but the Monday after.) and they love to talk to us, feed us, and always allow us to teach them a lesson auf Deutsch.

My companion is great at constantly challenging me with the German and with talking to everyone we see. I think so many missionaries don't talk to everyone cause they never tried going head first into just talking to everyone they see. But, with my companion he made sure to tear down any pride I might have right away. Our mission president even told us when we first got here "people might look at you strangly or call you strange, and that is because we are strange! We're dressed strange, we talk strange, and we're telling them about a church that if you have not heard about it before sounds strange! You're strange get over it!" Because of these words of advice and a good companion though we have had so much more success then he said he ever had!

When I first got here they only had about 1 investigator. Now that my companion and I are here though and working hard we have found on average 1.5 investigators a day! I know to some people that does not sound great but yesterday after my companion was done talking to his family we called in to report our numbers and our numbers were enough to put our mission over it's old record of numbers! The work is progressing and fast.We have also changed some of our time to go visit members and less active members. Since this change of just a couple hours a week we have had a less active family show up to church and talk to some members about their concerns, and some younger members we talked to brought some friends over to church!

This whole week has been full of experiences and I don't know how to list them all. Some of the experiences havn't been the best though. Like on Saturday we went to visit the investigator that has been taking the lessons and when we got there two of here friends showed up. I didn't think anything of it until they came into the room and started talking to us about how we have "many wives" and "worship Joseph Smith" then my companion told me they were Jehova witnesses. I don't know why they hate us so bad here especially since we never try to argue with them. All we do is offer a message about Christ and then they go off on a 20 minute tangent about how our prophets are false and blood transfusions are of the devil (I don't know either). The lady was extremely nice though I don't think she wanted to start anything like that it was just her husband who came in and started ranting at us.

But yeah you get some weird people sometimes. It is actually the punk teens who are generally the nicest to us. They are rather really nice about saying no or they usually like to talk to us about religion mixed with philsophy. It is the old people who claim to be really religious that curse and yell at you. It's weird being in the world again. People curse, smoke, drink, and fight each other. I guess when you're in the MTC you just assume everything bad just died off the earth for some reason while you were there.

The town I'm in though, Ellwangen. Is exactly how you would imagine an old school German town. It has the gothic architecture all kept up with the cobble stone roads and the town center smells of bratwurst, bread, and beer. German drivers are also insane. They drive as fast as they can everywhere with very sudden braking and sharp turning. They all are drag racers. And there is a good amount of people that dress up like gangsters but there is virtually no homocide or suicide. Graffiti is everywhere. Everything, like buildings and centers, look nice but then everynow and then you'll find a random wall just completely covered in graffiti.

We feed ourselves a lot but sometimes we get some fast food here. Mcdonald's and some turkish fast food places are really popular here. Also German is a hot spot for fashion of any sort. They have the pants they sell to some people in America for 200 bucks are only like 10-15 Euros. And it is funny seeing a lot of Turkish people here. And people treat them just like a lot of Americans treat illegal Mexicans. They don't want them here and they tell them that.Well it was great to be able to talk to all of you and I hope everything is still going great in your lives. Tschuss. Elder Hargett