1st week in Poland 🇵🇱✔️

Hey Mom!

This is officially the first letter from Poland! Pretty fun stuff! We've had a fun week, with finally leaving the MTC and the airport and Europe and everything, so it might me hard for me to get my thoughts all together. 

So first things first: Kraków! I got pretty dang lucky with probably the most famous city in Poland. It's really pretty here, and not quite as cold as it was in Warsaw that first day. We got there and there was ice. Contacting the first day was so freakin cold I was dying. Apparently it only gets worse from here. We did have a lot of fun though. I gave someone a Book of Mormon and set up a lunch appointment for the AP missionaries there, which is pretty lucky; apparently that never happens here. The funniest thing is it happened at the first house we knocked. 

That brings me to the next thing: the mission here is HARD. Like crazy hard. My training companion, Elder Vance has been here a year, and he's only even extended a baptismal invitation one time. And that dude flaked. That's not because he's not a good missionary either. He's awesome, and probably one of the best in Poland. Apparently a lot of the missionaries figure out a few things to say and then just give up because Polish is so hard. I can't say I blame them. I can barely understand anyone here. Church on the first week was hilarious. I got up and bore my testimony, and I did a pretty good job. All the members were really impressed because I'd been speaking for like 5 days here, and the Bishop asked if I had Polish family. Basically from that point on I understood about half of what was said for the rest of the 3 hours. Welp.

I am having a good time though. It's fun being here. The food's pretty good too, at least so far. We're pretty much super poor, so we barely eat at home (yesterday I ate some french fries for dinner), but a return missionary who's visiting bought us dinner the other night and we ate with the senior couple once too. That was a good meal. She made white chili soup kinda like you do and it tasted awesome. We won't be eating at the member's houses, and definitely not at nonmembers. They just can't really afford it. Apparently we sometimes will feed the members. Starszy Vance has had 2 meals with nonmembers in a year.

Vance is a pretty cool guy. Like I said, he's a boss at the language, and he's pretty dang patient too. He says that I came out of the MTC way ahead, so he thinks I can walk out of this transfer one transfer ahead. So that's my goal. It's also really nice having our own space in the apartment. It's pretty nasty, but it's big, so we have a ton of room to put our stuff. Apparently I got the worst bed in the mission, it's pretty much a mat. But somehow I come home every night and it's the most comfortable thing in the world. That's even more true in the mornings. In training, we have to wake up at 530.

We've got a lesson tonight, it'll be my first one. We should've had 3 more, but they all flaked. One of them actually showed up drunk, so that was neat. We probably wont be calling him again. I'm pretty excited for this one though. I actually contacted this guy. If we get him, he's mine. Wish me luck!

I can't think of much else new. One thing I do need though is stuff thats easy to cook! We eat the same stuff all the time! If you have any good recipies, like stuff for pancakes or cookies, send them please!

Love you guys so much! Alls well over in Kraków!

Na rasze,

Starszy Haskett