Week 1!

Below is the email we received outlining the adventures of her first week.

Week one! Allons-y!

Bonjour!

This week pretty much rocked. I love being here, and my district is the bomb.com (and since my district loves puns, we decided we're actually the BoM.com- get it?) and there's only four of us, including me! Soeur Archambault (my comp) is awesome. She's Canadian, and so we talk about the differences between here and Canada all the time. She pronounces her long A's differently, so 'bag' sounds kind of like 'beyg' and it's fantastic. Elder Woodbury is super dorky and we tease him because he has a song reference for EVERYTHING. But really. Everything. Elder Broadbent is really funny. He likes to make dorky faces and he can be pretty sarcastic and always tells these outlandish stories. The four of us are together more than 10 hours a day, so we're getting to know each other pretty well, and everyone else in our branch knows us as "that one district" because we only have four and each of us is going to different missions! Elder Broadbent is going to West Indies, Elder Woodbury to Canada, Soeur Archambault to St George Utah (yes, French speaking! She'll be in the visitor's center) and then me :) We want to take a picture by the big map so we can show where we're all going.

We had a goal setting meeting yesterday, and we set a few goals:
1) Focus. We all like each other, so we get off-topic really easily
2) Memorize the First Vision in French by January 5th
3) We have to give one compliment every time we insult each other. We all tease each other a lot, so we decided that would be a funny one. So basically, every time we tease Soeur Archambault about her accent, we then tell her her hair looks nice today or something of that nature.

We took several pictures, but I forgot to bring my camera when I went to do laundry (that's where I am now) and so we're going to save some email time and send them in a little while.

French is coming along really well. After I got here, they tested my french and wanted to move me to a three-week English program, but I don't think that's going to happen anymore. Probably just because it had already been two days and I would have been pretty behind. Everyone in our district has studied French before, so we're actually a week ahead of where we should be because we don't have to take nearly as long to learn things, since this is mostly review for us.

There's a sister across the hall from us who has a master's in violin! Plus, her comp plays piano really well. I checked out a violin from the MTC, and the three of us are performing prelude music for our branch's sacrament meeting this Sunday, and we're going to be working on a piece to audition to give a performance in a bigger meeting. I'm super excited. We're doing a really pretty arrangement of Silent Night. Our branch is made up of half of the French-speaking missions, so it's a pretty small group. It's going to be totally awesome.

One last thing. I got like 2 letters and 4 packages today.... You all rock ;) although the rest of my district definitely teased me about it as we carried them across campus all the way back to our rooms! On that note, you all should write them a letter! They're awesome people, and we have the same mailing address, just change the name and take away the FEB09 VAN-PV under the name. Elder Woodbury hasn't received anything yet, and Soeur Archambault doesn't expect to get anything because of how long it takes to mail things from Canada.

Also, if you are able to access it (I'm not sure, since it was a talk originally given in the MTC a few years back), look at Elder Bednar's talk entitled "Character of Christ". It seriously is life-changing!

I love you all so much! Keep being awesome!

Soeur Frost