Power Preaching

 Me and Bruder Marschaleck (my favourite old guy in the ward. And he
hates all the missionaries but me haha. He's the most amazing guy, and
told me I have to be a sailor someday)

Typical Erfurt back alleys.

Erfurt Sunrise.

The Weihnachtsmarkt is almost all the way built here in Erfurt!
Seriously I've just been getting so excited for Christmas ever since I got here. They have huge Christmas trees all over the place, and tons of little buildings with food and treats and nutcrackers. I just can't wait for it to officially start! Seriously everyone needs to see what it looks like here for Christmas.

This week was the week of crazy street displays and spending time in
random cities. Our zone leaders forced us to go to Apolda and do a
street display (I say forced because there was just us and a senior
couple there. And they didn't really give us any supplies to be able
to make anything cool.) so we went and ended up just throwing the
football that we had to random people on the street and then trying to
talk about the gospel. Apparently we were supposed to be there,
because we had some crazy success with getting phone numbers and
setting up appointments. Sadly though, none of the appointments are
for us... so we just found a bunch of the people for the zone leaders to teach hah. But apparently they liked our work so much that they planned another one in a different city for the next day.

(A street display is normally when you set up a table and have a bunch of missionaries with pamphlets and stuff out talking to people on the street.)

We had a couple lessons with Phillip and Silvio this week, and it has just been insanely cool. Elder Römer and I have been taking a really German approach to teaching, which means that it's just power
preaching. Lots of missionaries actually don't understand that it's ok to speak really forcefully here. But it actually is way cool to just say loudly, "Come to church and we'll baptize you the next week!" You don't really have to be polite here (aside from at meals), because the people just really want to know straightforwardly what you want from them. I like that a lot actually haha.

Also, we've been meeting with this guy named Mykola, he's native
Ukrainian but sadly he's a little crazy. But he honestly has the
biggest heart out of anyone I've ever met. I don't know what exactly
we can do for him, but we are trying our best just to read out if the Book of Mormon and just be his friend.

This week has just been a good one! Send me pictures of everything at home haha. Love you all!

-Elder Openshaw