Joyeux Noël from France!!!
This first week in France has been amazing!! Though the weather has been rather wet. Tuesday it rained and Wednesday and Friday it snowed quite a lot, I was glad to have a white Christmas though.
I got to meet both of our progressing investigators, we only have 2 at the moment but we have quite a few new ones. Yué is a student from China and is so cute. She has an amazing testimony and if we can get her to church more I think she will be ready. Nathaly is African and super cute as well, she is a little more frustrating because she had a baptisimal date for November 6th but cancelled it. We are working with her to try and get her ready and help her know for herself. We are meeting with her tonight and will be going to FHE in Paris with her. I am really excited for the holidays to be over, it is hard to do missionary work when everyone is out of town.
Dispite that I had a lovely Christmas. We received 2 invitations to dinner for Chrismas Eve and Christmas both were English speaking for which I was most grateful. For dinner Christmas Eve we went to a French family's house (look I found the apostrophe!) French meals have several courses which I should have known but forgot and which my companion also forgot to mention, I was quite full by the end. We ate the traditional French Christmas feast including raw salmon with lemon ( I ate mine on a baguette, very tasty) Coquille Saint Jaques (scallops on a half shell) mashed potatoes called purée which I also learned is an expression like shoot or dang. Poultry that is not chicken or turkey but tastes like it, salad, green beans (the french style of course), cheese: Roquefort a fairly strong variety that I liked, goat which I did not like at all. And of course a bouche de Noel. We played a couple of games before dinner and we sang Petit Papa Noel, they were very impressed that I knew it, thank you Pete Seeger Christmas album.
Our Christmas dinner was with a British family, the Camilles, which is slightly amusing as my companion's first name is Camille. The food could not have been more different but is was also soooo good. I had a lot of firsts: yorkshire pudding, eggplant, and parsnips; all of which were covered in gravy. The Camilles have 2 children, Finnley who is 7 and goes by Finney and Felicity who is 4 and loves barbies. My companion played Just Dance 2 on the Wii with Finney, it was so funny.
Church on Sunday was an adventure, I didn't understand a whole lot of what was taught, our RS lesson was on the life of Christ which I was able to follow pretty well because she had a lot of pictures. We talked (and by we I mean Soeur Pobst) to a couple of members during Sunday School. Sacrament meeting was interesting, the musical number by the choir was awful, but the Primary song was okay. I knew the topic was Jesus Christ but beyond that I am not really sure. It doesn't help that I fell asleep a couple of times, I tried so hard to stay awake, but alas I did not succeed. Not only were we in the second row, one of the members brought some friends to church for the first time and they sat next to us. Great first impression, no? They seemed excited about church in spite of the fact I slept through it though.
Today [Monday] is p-day of course, we are going to Paris to the Louvre and the Arc de Triophe. I am so excited. I hope your New Years is wonderful!!!
Love always,
Soeur Gaelin Turney
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