For one this keyboard is a little diff so bear with me. Every Wed we get 90 minutes to email and now we can email whoever we want! Friends, family, investigators, etc! So excited! So please tell everyone to just email me. I found out that I only get physical mail once a month unless you mail it to my actual address. so lets just do email for time sake.
okay sooo the flight we had awesome missionary experiences with some kids going on a nondemoninational church trip to slovakia for a week, super cool. we got to milan, they took us sorelle out to the cathedral and duomo to do some proselyting. we stayed in a hotel and the next day we were all antsy cause we found out where we were going and who our trainer would be. we were all soooo excited, like getting our calls all over again. i am in Bergamo, about an hour northeast of milano. In a cold, hilly area. google it haha. i actually live in alzano lombardo, a suburb outside of the city, our whole area covers the right side of all the outskirt suburbs. its huge. theres 10 different missionaries serving in our area. us and 2 anziani are in the bergamo 1 ward. we live with 2 other sorelle, one of them i actually met in the mtc once, she is from albania and already speaks italian so she wasnt at the mtc long. they are all super cool.
we actually just went to città alta, google that too. so gorgeous. i had my first gelato cone today. OMG. i will never be able to eat ice cream again. so my comp is sorella bunker, she has been out for 15 months. all 3 of my roomies are fluent.
to be completely honest, my first full day in my area, which was friday, was prob the worst day of my life. there was a transit sciopero (strike) and so we were stuck in centro, the middle of bergamo without a way to get back. we walked for so long. we also had consillio, ward council where we met our vescovo, bishop and everyone else, and i couldnt understand anything. i was so exhausted i kept falling asleep. it was like 2 hrs long. i felt so lost and i dont understand how people pick up a new language. i cried a little to myself that night. and you know i dont cry often haha.
but its gotten better. we talk to alot of people all the time and we had a member lesson yesterday and actually on that rough day we taught this awesome lady from bolivia, cristina. she was so receptive to everything we were saying but she is visiting her daughter in switzerland for 6 months! so we gave her a spanish book of mormon and said hope to see you again. tots coulda had her as an investigator.
oh ya IMPORTANT. we are opening this area, meaning neither one of us had ever been here before, we dont have an area book, we are completely starting from scratch in this city.
okay so some funny stories. we were talking to this guy outside the biblioteca, library, and idk whats really happening in the convo, but when i asked to meet up another time to talk more about religion he seemed down, then kind of drifted away from the idea and was rambling (italians are ramblers) and then i interjected again and said maybe we can talk tomorrow? haha i guess when i said that he was talking about how someone in his family died hahahaha. bad timing.
today i was ordering french fries and she kept saying 2 something, so i was like no 1. come to find out she is telling me 2 euro hahaha but i didnt know how they said euro in italian.
we were doing a teaching practice in district meeting and i was talking to anziano grimaldi who is from sicily and doesnt speak english, and i was trying to talk about gods love for us and how families are forever. and i thought he said he had two kids, so i was like PERFETTO! but really what he said was his 2 kids died...hahaha so his face was classic and he was like no perfetto! lol
the other day we were ringing the buzzer things to try to talk to folks, side note i dislike doing houses, but this one lady was talking to us out her balcony and i was like salve! noi siamo missionarie per...she slammed the door hahaha. so then i yelled BUONA SERA! haha
lots of cool miracles too! i am running out of time for all of this! tonight we have a lesson with Bach, a cool dude we met last night from the ivory coast who speaks french and italian. we were late coming home from ward council and he actually came up to us and started chatting. side note everything thinks we are johovas witness. but we started chatting and i was understanding a lot of what he said cause he talked slower. it was awesome. we told him about the book of mormon and he said he loves to read so we were like heck ya!
theres a ton of african people here and actually a lot of people from bolivia and ecuador in bergamo. like a ton. kind of random. we have teaching appts with potential investigators the next 4 days in a row!
ill have to tell you more coolness things later sorry. we only got 30 mins today bc we were so late.
also remind me to tell you about this past sunday, i ate at a real italians house with like 16 ppl and a ton of courses. some food is amazing, some is disgusting. but thats life right.
well i love you tonssssssss!!!!!
ti voglio bene
Sorella Gillette
ps everyone asks if i am french.
