I'm Thankful For You Guys :') - 11/24/18

Mii's baptism

Me, taking the plug out of the font

The wedding

Herro Friends, Family, and Acquaintances.

This week was a very interesting week. We had a lot of random stuff going on. 

Okay, starting from the top: Mii was baptized! Yay! I had the opportunity to baptize her, so that was awesome. 

Oh yeah, on Saturday night we got to go to the wedding of a less active member here. She got married to a member from Thailand, so hopefully she'll be able to start coming back. But yeah, the wedding was wild. We got to meet a lot of nice drunk people and took some pretty solid pics. We had Elder Phasay's cousin, Pocky, take us. Pocky is way awesome, but doesn't know anything about the church. This past week we've been able to do a lot of fun stuff with the YSA here, and had Pocky go as well. She is becoming pretty good friends with all of them, so that's really cool.  

That Luang Festival

We taught English as usual on Monday and Tuesday, but we had off the rest of the week because of...That Luang Festival! That Luang festival was wild. We went to it with a bunch of the YSA and Pocky. There were soooooo many people there. We just kinda walked around and looked at the shops everywhere and stuff. At one point we took lots of pictures with the YSA, and that suddenly drew a crowd of young Lao people to us. They then formed a circle around our group and kept asking to take photos with us. Being blonde is a struggle guys. 

On Thursday night/Thanksgiving, we went to a restaurant and ate turkey sandwiches which was awesome. I haven't had turkey in coming close to 2 years. 

Tonight we will be going to a YSA pizza/bowling party, so that should be pretty koooool. 

This upcoming week Elder Phasay and I will go to Bangkok again and cross our fingers that the office will remember that we exist. Yay more travel.  

That's about my life now.  Warning, there are a lot of photos this week, so there may be more than one email. 

Thank you all for existing and being such an influence in my life!!! 

Have an awesome week, my dudes.

<3

Elder Ridd 

There and Back Again..... and again...... and again - 11/17/18

Big bus station that I've seen too many times in my life

Sleepless in McDonald's

Random rabbits at a member's house

The squad

Whassup my dudes?

Another good week out here. A sleep deprived week, but still a good one. 

SO, this week started great with Lanoy getting confirmed! It got better because we cleared up the confusion with Mii's parents. They are actually fine with her getting baptized and plan on coming. So that's neat. She'll be getting baptized tomorrow by yours truly. I'm way excited for her. 

We taught English as usual on Monday, but on Tuesday Elder Phasay and I ran to catch a bus to cross the Laos -Thai border and get to Udorn. We were able to do that successfully, and helped Udorn teach their English class. Hah, who doesn't love English class? It seems to be a common theme in my mission. 

We then partnered up with Elder Byers, one of my good friends from the MTC, and grabbed a bus to Bangkok the next day. Fun fact: We also took Haylee Hammond, the mission president's daughter, down to Bangkok with us. Apparently she's doing a mini mission here or something, so President moves her around a lot to help even out areas if there are any emergency transfers. So that was an interesting 10-hour bus ride. 

When we got to Bangkok we grabbed some food real quick with one of Elder Byers's recent converts there and then went to the Assistant's house to crash. At about 2 in the morning, the Assistants - as well as some other Elders that came to get their visas renewed - stumbled into the house, waking everyone up. Lol. Then we went back to bed and got up at the lovely time of 4 AM to head to the visa place. 

So far, so good right? Well, when we got to the visa place we waited about 4 hours until 8 AM. Then when all the missionaries received their papers to renew their visas, Elder Phasay and I mysteriously never received ours. Luckily, we can put two and two together, so we asked the office worker who was in charge of getting our visa stuff all ready. Long story short, we were told to come down to get our Thai visas renewed, which is all good and well, but the people in the office decided not to get our papers ready because our passports weren't at the office. So obviously they took that to mean that we either aren't real, or we don't need renewals. So without confirming with anyone, they just didn't get our stuff ready. It appears we took the trip down for almost no reason hahahaha. While we were in Bangkok, President interviewed us, so I guess there was that. 

We finally cleared stuff up though, and we will be making that trip down again in 2 weeks. I can't wait. It was great to see all of my MTC group though. Those guys are great. Seeing Bangkok also brought back a bunch of weird memories haha. The buildings are so big there, which was weird cause in Laos I'm used to almost all buildings being less than 4 stories tall, with dirt roads everywhere. I'm ready for some culture shock when I get back. So yeah, that was a wild time. 

Hopefully you guys had a little less of a hectic week haha.

I love and miss you all! 

Elder/Comrade/Secret Missionary Ridd