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