CZECH MISSIONARIES COMMEMORATE 84TH ANNIVERSARY OF DEDICATION BY JOHN WIDTSOE

On July 24, we met up with President and Sister McConkie and their Czech missionaries at the site where Apostle John A. Widtsoe dedicated the country for preaching the gospel 84 years ago to the day in 1929.  The missionaries rededicated themselves to their part in realizing the promises pronounced on the Czech Republic and its surrounding neighbors.

 Overlooking Prague from the castle on the hill.

 Dinner with the McConkies at a great Italian  restaurant on the river.  Notice President McConkie on duty 24/7.

 The Prague missionaries do a "Musical Display" near a busy subway/bus transfer stop.  They take turns with their companions, first singing a while then street contacting passers-by for a couple of hours each Friday.  Hyrum was anxious to street contact too and accompanied one of the Elders for his first rejection :(.  Now he has done the hardest part of missionary work and it will only get better.

 On our way to Zwichau to visit Christel Hafner, we stopped for an hour in Dresden and went to the top of the Frauen Kirchen where we had a beautiful view of the entire city.

 Martin Luther's statue in front of the Frauen Kirchen.  also Martin Craven with his Frauen Elaine.

 Mutti sacrificed for me and arranged for us to take the Phaeton assembly plant factory tour in Dresden.  We decided we did not need a Phaeton ($100,000-$160,000 VW) but now appreciate why they cost so much.

 We spent Saturday with Elaine's distant Buttler cousin, Christel Hafner  in Zwichau.  Her son Uwe and spouse Sybile joined us for some site-seeing, a walk in the forest and dinner.

 Christel wanted us to have our first roulande in Germany and we could not turn her down.  Our first real beef dinner in over 2 years.  Probably took 2 years off our lives, but sure was gute.

 The temple and surrounding grounds in Freiberg are very pretty.  Very warm and kind members here and in Zwichau where we attended Sunday. We pray they will find more to join them.

DOG DAYS OF SUMMER

Last week's trip to Budingen - the Frog town

It's been a quiet week in Frankfurt.  We have been preparing for our next training assignment and helping  the Kagels get up to speed with their duties.  The paid employees are all on annual leave in our office and when we call people in other departments we find most are off on holiday until sometime in August, when school starts again.  The weather has been warm but we are not complaining, gets up into the 80s and, hold on to your sun bonnet, could get to 90  this next week. There does not seem to be air conditioning in Germany, so we have lots of fans blowing all the time. We had the sister missionaries over for dinner yesterday and had a young member here on business over for Sunday lunch.  Elaine is a good cook and they are grateful. We have been enjoying our children's vacations vicariously via Path and Instagram and are grateful to be able to see our grandchildren grow up  and enjoy the summer, if only via photos.
Stay with us, we hope to have more to report next week after visiting the McConkies in Prague.
  

Looks like Elaine lives here

As castles go, Budingen is fairly humble

MOVING FORWARD

Elder and Sister Rick and Jan Kagel arrived on July 2nd.  They hit the ground running and you know how these new young missionaries bring energy and enthusiasm to the office.

On the Fourth, the Senior Missionaries got together for KFC and root beer in the parking lot at the Fredrichsdorf chapel.  Good food, great friends.

 On our way to Copenhagen we stopped near Hamburg in Northern Germany to see Buttler relatives, Anne and Gunter Dembski and their son Andreas. (So where is Andreas?)

 We spent Sunday afternoon with the family of our Denmark Public Affairs Director, Martin Stokholm.  The girls Kristina and Sophie are on the left, then wife Eva, Martin and Martin and son Michael.  These folks are the best of the best and so good to us.  Made us feel like family as we got to help choose among 6 wedding cakes, the one for Kristina's wedding on 27 July.

 Monday was our culture day.  We visited Thorvaldson's Christus, Dennis Smith's "Kristina" on the old docks of Denmark where the saints embarked for Zion, and we went to Frederiksborg Palace to see Carl Bloch's paintings of the life of Christ.

 Kristina - by Dennis Smith. Engraved bricks in walkway next to the water contain the names of some of the 20,000 saints that left from here in the 1850's to go to Zion.  Danish saints were once the largest ethnic population in Utah.

 Carl Bloch paintings in the Palace prayer room.

Got to go to Ward Temple Night in Copenhagen.  The interior is beautiful.  The Danes know design.

Most important part of the trip was training 3 zones in 3 cities on 3 days in how to be good spokespersons for the church with media representatives.  This is the zone in Aarhus, Mission President Sederholm is on the front row 3rd from left.

On the way home, we stopped by Gisela Werth and Hans Fischer's home near Hannover to say hi and renew old friendship.  Gisela was married to Ortwin who died a few years back. She now has a good friend Hans to keep her company

GOODBYE DEAR FRIENDS

We just dropped our senior missionary mentors, the Brandes and the Derrs, off at the airport for their return home to Salt Lake City.  The Brandes picked us up when we came last fall and were our fellow Public Affairs servants. The Derrs were our Paris guides last March and our  Zone Leaders- they were Family History specialists. So hard to see them go, the Brandes were good teachers, good examples and good friends to us here in Germany and we will miss them sorely.  This week Elaine handled the newsroom translation requests and Martin prepared for our next assignment in Copenhagen to assist with training missionaries to be good spokespersons for the church when interviewed by journalists. We are also helping to create 2-page fact sheets for each of the 30 countries in our area.  Church representatives use these fact sheets when meeting with opinion leaders or hosting government officials such as ambassadors in their countries.

Goodbye dear Brandes

Goodbye dear Derrs

SPENCE AND XAN GET A HONEYMOON

Francesco DiLillo, Assistant PA Director in our office, and his wife Manuela  invited the Brandes and us to dinner this week.  We enjoyed being with their cute young boys and feasting on fabulous Italian cooking by Manuela.  The Brandes are heading home in a few days and we are going to miss them dearly.  Not sure how we will be able to get along without them.

Spence and Xan came for a visit this week and we took them south for a few days to see Bavaria and our good friends the Schoenwalds, Berndt and Angelika.  Angelika and Elaine were childhood friends here during her dad's mission and we exchanged children back in the day, with Emily and Ali coming to their home for a month.  Xan is taking the picture here just before we head off to church.  Ruthie is kneeling with her daughter.  She came to our house with her cousin for a month many years ago.

On our way back north we passed by Dachau and stopped to visit this concentration camp war memorial site.  A very sobering experience to feel the breadth and depth of these victims agony and to contemplate how it could be possible for humans to be so cruel to their fellow man.

The beautiful land of Bavaria in southern Germany.  Don't know if we will ever be able to re-acclimate to Utah.

Fun to wear our missionary tags when traveling on P-day. It gives us the opportunity to meet many vacationing members and update them on the progress of the Church in Europe.

Can't describe how wonderful it was to be with our baby boy and  his sweet bride.  We are  comforted to see how happy they are and excited about life and doing so well.  We cried when they had to go, not knowing when we will see them again.

It's still hard to believe parts of this country are for real.  Charming doesn't begin to describe it, especially if you could hear the accordian and guitar playing in the background by two leder-hosened Bavarians.

The art of Marzipan 

This is Obersee or Ober sea above Koenigsee in Berchesgaden  National  Park.  The  little berg hut  on the shore in the distance below the water fall with cows grazing near by was over the top spectacular.  The lake reflection is near perfect.

A GLIDE IN THE PARK

Germany has generally has pretty good playground equipment in their parks and we have visited several with zip lines. This past week on a walk after dinner we tried out one close by our apartment and Tasha, our BYU intern, caught Elaine on "film".

 This week our assignment was to watch all the video footage that was taken for the five country Newsroom Video project and confirm that we had signed permission to use each person's interview.  The Church is very careful and will not use a picture of a person if we do not have a  release to use image in our files.  Elaine also practiced her photo editing skills to polish the member photos she took in Sweden before making them available to Sweden's public affairs team.

We are trying to get all the information we can about the assignments the Brandes have before they leave the 1st of July so we can show the new missionaries how to do what they were doing.  Sister Brande is in charge of getting newsroom articles translated so Elaine is figuring out how that works.

On an evening bike ride we went past a pick-yourself strawberry field, so went back yesterday and picked a couple of kilos just for fun.  Elaine made these tasty fresh strawberry pies that we served to some lucky senior missionary couples today.

FIRST PHOTOS WITHOUT OUR COATS ON!

On our cemetery walk we came on this dumpster full of head
stones of those whose families had not paid
the rent due on their plot

Here it is another Sunday night in Frankfurt, but feels very different this week.  It is hot, we have all the windows open and my sleeves are rolled up.  We smell the cigarette smoke of the other tenants in the building as they sit on their little balconies and enjoy the evening air.  Did you know compared to Utah, Germany is jam packed with birds. It’s a constant chorus night and day – a birdwatchers paradise. We rode our bikes downtown yesterday to see how high the Main River was and to get Nana’s bike fixed at the flea market.  The weekly flea market is a site - all kinds of strange junk for sale and the people are from everywhere – lots it seems from Turkey and Russia. 

We had the sister missionaries and the Elders over for dinners this past week.  The sisters report they are so busy they have a very hard time getting around to all of their investigators.  They have some baptisms coming up and people coming to church Sunday so they are excited.  The Elders are equally enthusiastic and positive about the work and its inspiring to be with them.

People swarm to the park on the first hot day of the year

Copied pictures of our NDPA seminar for all 25 countries who attended

One on-going job is to keep these hard copy files in case our hard drive crashes?

Our new intern, Tasha Singer, assists with the Newsletter. ( Actually she does it all and I send it off.)

The flooding is now getting worse in the north.  The Main has peeked.

Our biking buddies, the Swifts.  We rode an hour to the Frankfurt forest - miles of trails.

The Germans have a rhyme that goes "In heaven there's no beer so we must drink it here."

Our family away from home.  The Frankfurt missionaries at the temple after zone conference.

FLOODING IN GERMANY

This before and after photo is of Passau, a city in the south of Germany in Bavaria where the Danube and two other rivers join together.  We have umbrellas, turns out we need paddles.

http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/foto-vergleich-zur-flut-passau-vor-und-waehrend-des-hochwassers-a-903482.html

NORWAY IN A NUTSHELL

Our way back to Frankfurt from Sweden this past week included a detour over to Oslo Norway for "cultural experience" .  We took a 16-hour round trip train ride east towards Bergen Norway with a boat ride on the Aurlands Fjord in the middle.  Norway has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth.

After putting 2200 miles on the car we are glad to be home in our own beds and eating home cooked meals.  Friday in the office we began editing photos and working on a list of requests to help the Swedish Public Affairs Council.  The Swedish saints are disappointed that President Monson will not be coming as expected but look forward to Elder Ballard and his CES devotional which will be broadcast to buildings all over Europe.

Friday evening we again enjoyed our monthly temple outing with the senior missionaries.  As friends depart for home we meet new couples who bring new talents and enrich our lives.  This week we look forward to being instructed by Elder Richards, counselor in the Area Presidency, at our zone conference.  These gatherings always uplift us with the Spirit.

Eating Norwegian salmon on a slice of fresh bagette.  We buy lunch at grocery stores and always find fun picnic stops on the road.  The house in the background is floating in the middle of the lake.

Norway has more lakes and forests than we've ever seen.  We were the same latitude as Juno Alaska.
We enjoyed sunlight from 4 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Frozen lake near Norway's summit.  No roads here and above the tree line.  The train took us through 20 tunnels, many dug by hand at a meter a month.

On the Aurlands Fjord

As many as a dozen waterfalls could be viewed at once

This "twisted torso" building is in Malmo, Sweden where we stayed on the way home.

It's a permanent parade in downtown Malmo.