2/2/15

So I made it to the big city! I am right in the middle of downtown Orlando. It is crazy awesome! We are about a ten minute walk from Lake Eola (if you look up pictures of Orlando the fountain in all of them is on lake Eola.) it is awesome! They haven't had missionaries that cover exclusively downtown Orlando in a good while (I don't know how long, over 2 years at least.). One other set of Elders are in the ward with us, they covered the whole ward before we got here. Another cool thing is that we are the only area in the whole mission that is full bus. ( And bike.) It's pretty crazy. We gothere Tuesday, we were given the keys to the apartment and a phone at the transfer meeting. And then a member of the ward here brought us back to our apartment, we filled out some paperwork for the apartment and headed out for the day. So we have been exploring a lot and trying to talk to everyone, we don't really have any investigators yet, but we'll get some this week! When we got to the apartment there was almost no food. Just a few cans that the mission office had put in there when they furnished the apartment. So that first night our dinner was a can of baked beans.Because we don't have a car it is rather difficult to get to the store and then bring back all our groceries. But we survived! Another thing we did that first night was we decided that we needed to know the bus system, after all we are full bus. So we asked the apartment office where the nearest place was that we could find bus maps. They pointed us in the right direction, and it turns out that we live just blocks away from the main bus depot of Orlando. Which is nice. We went there and didn't have any idea what maps we needed so we just grabbed one of each. Twenty two different maps is kind of a lot! We spent the rest of the evening trying to figure all this madness. Let's just leave it at I think the head ache is gone. We are starting to catch on to how things work, so that is a relief. 
Also, my new companion is Elder Hemsley, he is a great guy and a great missionary. He has been out for 20 months so it is pretty great to work with him. This place is nothing like my last area. Nothing at all. There aren't any gated communities, but there are skyscraper apartment buildings. There is so much of it is commercial (we had next to no stores or anything in my last area, it was all residential. Very nice residential). Now we got a few nice places now, the nicest ones being the skyscrapers, we also have some hardcore ghetto. It is pretty great! There are homeless people everywhere. I've never seen so many of them. Though most of them are down for talking about Christ, though it is hard because we can't really teach them because they need to have an address for us to be able to baptize them. Most homeless people are very nice though, the first night we were told by a homeless guy that we glow, and that he knew from a ways away that we are "the Lord's people".
Funny story, yesterday morning we were getting picked up to go to church by our ward mission leader, who we have never met before. So we are standing outside of our apartment waiting and this car pulls up tous and the driver rolls down his window and says "hey guys get in" so we got in then he said "so where we going?" O.o He could tell we were confused, so he asked "are you not Jose?" Ha ha we of course told him no, apparently he was picking up someone who he didn't know and because we were waiting there he thought we were the people he was giving a ride to, and we thought he was our ride to church. Our ward mission leader pulled up about a minute later. Ha ha We almost got kidnapped! Life in the city is exciting!The church is true, the book is blue, if your not reading it.... Start now.

Elder Dane Olsen