Email Sent June 8, 2012

Guten Tage,

Since I have not been very good at writing, I will try to update you on what we have been doing the last few weeks.  Sometimes it seems as though

we are not doing exciting things or having many great spiritual experiences.  We seem to have a lot of spare time so we are just trying to get to know the city and some of the members that live close.  We really don't have many members that live near us.  Most of them seem to live outside the city, more in the country.  In the city most of the members live in apartment buildings.  There are so many apartment buildings in this city!

We usually get up at 6 am, have breakfast, read the scriptures, study German (it is somewhat hard to study German, all of the other couples in

this mission have companions who speak the language).  We listen to German tapes, and try to study the book we received at the MTC but it is

hard to know if we are pronouncing the words correctly. 

EW (Elder Weidman, Dad, Brent, Papa etc) was trying to say a few words in German to one of the YSA kids, the kids said, I speak English!  EW said, but I am trying to learn German.  kid said, Austrian is different than German and probably you won't be able to speak it that well.

They really do sound different here and use different words than what we think we are saying. The kid also said the church words that we learned in the MTC are not what the members know around here, and they won't know what we are talking about.

We come to the church every Monday night for FHE.  Usually we only have about 8-10 youth, sometimes more, most times less.  We will be losing

some come August because they are leaving for school.  We hope that we can find more of them to come.  There is such a problem with

transportation here.  They often have to come by train and bus, some rides bikes from 10 K out in the country.  Not many of them have cars.

Then if they come by train they have to leave early to catch the only train back home. I may have told you that before, but it is such a big

deterrent in them coming to the center and having activities. If you look on a map, they come from Wels and Haag and the villages around Linz.

 Anyway they come and have a lesson and then a meal (that we will be preparing) and sometimes they stay and play a game but most of the

time they go home.  On Wed. night, they have an Institute class.  EW and I have sat in and listened to the lesson, but cannot understand too much of what is going on.  We can read the scriptures on our IPAD that are in German, but they all talk so fast we only catch a few words.  It is a bit

discouraging to us.

EW wants to try and set up a game night on Friday nights and hopefully we can get more people out to just have fun with each other.  We were

thinking about doing an English class, but they said to wait until Sept. when people are back from their vacations.

On Thursday, May 24, we took the train with the Haag, Wels, and Linz Elders to Salzburg, Austria for a zone conference meeting that took

most of the day.  We met with the Mission President and his wife.  Their were 5 missionary couples there and 5 sets of Elders, 3 Sister missionaries, plus the 2 Zone leaders.  President Miles talk about obedience and the finding days in our mission.  The missionaries found many people and took their phone numbers and gave out pass along cards.  Our Linz Elders found 20 people, EW and I only found a couple.

We had a great meal prepared by the Salzburg RS and then did some practice teaching in the afternoon. We were getting ready to go to the train

and it started to hail with thunder and lighting.  The Salzburg couple took us to the train station, but the poor Elders had to walk in the rain.

We ended up taking a train with the Sisters from Neu Markt, including Sister Holmstead.  The conductor told us if we got off the train and took the

one that was coming by in a few minutes, we would get home faster.  We were happy that he told us to do that, and we were home by 8 pm.

We are at the church and I am typing this on the computer here because it is easier to type on than my little laptop. My crooked fingers get

in the way on that one and I hit buttons that don't make funny words.

We will write more about the tagung ( YSA conference) later.

Love and miss you all,

write us some news

Elder and Sister Weidman

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Papa