Our First 'Official' Email

Now that he is all settled in and onthe first PDay. Doug thought he would get acquainted with the Hungarian keyboard and the internet cafe!


12/31/07
Welcome to Hungary!
hey family
i can1t find the exclamation point on this hungarian keyboard :) itis just a wee bit different, but no worries.
so i am in the city called hájdúboszormény which is just outside of the big city Debrecen. it1s just me and my trainer here, but we do a bumnch of stuff as a district in our free time :)
so my trainers name is elder johnson, and dad, you joked about me going to the southern states and learning a new language: southern accent, and the mission president said i get to learn 2 languages here, and you were both right, because he1s from north carolina :) but it1s all good! (i just found the exclamation point :) )
and along with that, we1re serving in the kind of outskirts of town and so the hungarian that our investigators speak is like redneck talk in english :s how am i supposed to learn? haha it'll be good.so, we live in a little apartment that is actually not too bad, there are some major different things about it though, the horror stories of the toilets are true... but i'll learn :)
umm... elder carlson was my old companion, i think mom wanted to know... so i1ll probably send just one email to the fam, becasue it actually costs monez here at the internet café... i hope that1s ok.so i was wondering, dad, do you remember that language that i made up a couple years ago? well, if my room is still the same, all of that stuff is in a basket on the bottom of my bookshelves... coul you dig through it and find any page where it has a list of the alphabet? and end it to me? it should have like 'abcd...' and then what the letters are in the language i made up... elder reeves and some others wanted to see what it looks like... if you could like copy one or two sheets of it, that1d be awesome!! but if you can1t find one, no worries...
this kezboard is nuts... sorry if my spelling is bad...
i don1t know what my address is yet, so just send my mail to the mission home for now... and i1ll let you know what it is later.
so i had my first tracting experience sunday night and it went well, we had a couple finds and hopefully something turns out good.
i had to bear my testimony in sacrament meeting :s a little scary, but no worries, it went ok. i can kind of understand some of what they are speaking, which is good. we have one of the only branch houses in debrecen, which is cool, it1s pretty nice :)
OH, the first day, we went out streeting, and that is a little weird, i1m not used to stopping random people and talking about the gospel... but we tried :) when elder reeves went up to his person to talk to, he spoke hungarian to them and they answered in english!!! haha, he felt just a little dumb.
a lot of people here know english, at least some english, which is handy when you donát know how to say a word, but which is bad cause they want to practice english and we want to practice hungarian...
FOOD: i had my first authentic hungarian meal. it was interesting.. we had a soup which was pretty good, except for the chunks of eggs. i will get used to that i1m sure, but i almost lost my ookies on the last bite... luckily their bread makes up for it :) i'm pretty sure i won't gain any weight in my first area, because we donát eat breakfast half the time and the other half, i1m not sure what it is i1m eating! for example, last night we went to a brand new person1s house (my trainer and hgis old campanion tracted into him just last week) and his name is Zoli. but they served us dinner and i thought we were eating beef.... haha no... it was sheep and it still had the bones in it and such, we had to chew carefully, becase there were bits of broken bones all over in it, it was pretty good actually, just weird, i1ll get used to it and it will be yummy. the ásvánviz (soda water) is interesting, but i1m starting to like it, i1ll get there, well, i gotta run for now, i have to email the president :)
love ya tons and i1ll talk to ya later'=
love ya! elder gaufin
p.s. the whole right side of the keyvboard is like the "o" and "u" with all the different kinds of dots above the and so they have to move eveything else to make those fit :) szia!