Andorra: The Explora

Holy WEEK!...well, actually that's during Easter...I've definitely used that opening before. Have I really been out long enough to start to recycle Spanish culture-related quips? Dang.

Anywho! This was quite the week. Last Tuesday, I arrived in Lleida in the evening and fortunately, we stayed the night with the elders who live there. Lleida is about a three hour bus ride away from Andorra, but we are a part of their district, so that means that I will get very familiar with that route. In the morning, we went to the bus station and headed out on our journey. 

( 🎶"A three hour tour..."🎶)

As we headed farther up north, things got greener, and greener, and greener. For the first time in a very long time I saw corn fields, I saw natural grass, I saw fertile farmland--Cows! I saw cows. Rolling emerald hills interrupted by the occasional rugged mountain peak encompassed all of my surroundings...then we changed buses. We hadn't even entered Andorra yet. Next thing I know, things get more mountainous. Now we're riding along a river winding through a rugged valley full of trees standing boldly in the mid-summer heat. This continued on with wide clearing breaking through every now and then, but we STILL hadn't arrived in Andorra! We arrived in La Seu d'Urgell, a Catalonian town that stands as the last bit of Spanish civilization before crossing the border. We were met by the Southwicks who are the senior missionary couple that work in the local branch. From La Seu they drove us up to Andorra and oh my gosh it is time for a rant about Andorra:

Andorra is by far the most beautiful area that I've ever served in. This place is nothing but continuous mountains and valleys, broken up by the occasional hamlet or cluster of mansions. The mountainsides are blanketed with varied trees and plant life. A pleasant breeze almost always passes through and the temperatures have yet to surpass 80°. I literally feel like I'm camping whenever I take a step outside, but I live here! We even have a river running by our apartment. People here are loaded. I saw a convertible Range Rover. The pavement has a silver content of 3.57%. I swear I saw a man sneeze into a 100€ bill. Tom Brady's pool boy owns a timeshare here with Bill Gates' accountant. Gah! This place is amazing. My most used phrases as I've been out and about visiting different towns have been the following:

"Goodness gracious!"

"Where the heck am I right now?" (Out of amazement, not confusion. I'm rather oriented.)

"Holy mackerel..."

"I love this place!"

"This place is so friggin' awesome!"

"Seriously! Where the crap am I right now???" (Once again, amazement.)

It's pretty much just been a constant cycle of those 6 interjections. 

The members here are nice but few and far between. There is a branch in La Seu (of the which Elder Southwick is branch president), and a member group up in Andorra (pretty much an extension of the branch). On Sundays we go to sacrament meeting in La Seu that starts at 10:30, meet for only two hours, eat lunch at the Southwicks', then we all drive up to Andorra la Vella (the most centered city in Andorra) and have another two-hour round of meetings in a hotel conference room for the handful of members that live there. Today there were five people present, not including missionaries. Quite a few of the members in both congregations have been baptized within the past couple of years.

Moving on to the week, this week was good. Pretty hectic because this area is a smidge complicated, but good. Our area covers all of Andorra and a bit of Spain that reaches down to La Seu. We do not have a car, but the bus systems are very efficient, and we actually do have our own car, but we're waiting for all the paperwork to go through so that I can actually drive it. Yes, I will be driving...in Europe. *shudder* Over the past week we did a lot of the same things. We knocked quite a few apartment complexes with little success. Along with that, we have recently been given a member list and we've been asked if we could go around and confirm whether people still live where we think they live or not, so we've been doing that. Because of the bus system and the closeness of everything, this place really just feels like one big city that's spread out over the mountains.

Elder Dransfield is awesome. He's from California and has a little over a year in the mission. He knows how to work, is very easygoing, can sing and play the piano, and is probably the best companion I could have as my first companion from the old Barcelona mission in regards to cooperation and integration. We still scratch our heads at how different our two neighboring missions were. They really shouldn't have been that different (the old Barcelona mission had a looot of extra and unnecessary restrictions or focuses that at times would even contradict what the Church has announced in the past), but we're figuring it out. We laugh a lot.

Other tidbits about my new area:

•Preparation Day is still on Monday, just not during transfer week. I forgot to fully explain that.

•The official language is Catalan. It's just a Frenchy Spanish. It's easy to understand for the most part, but reading it can be a pain and everything is spelled out phonetically (por ejemplo: año=anyo). Once you figure out how the "X", "J", and double "L" sound, it makes more sense...sometimes. I'm still figuring that out. They also have a weird/potentially-nonexistent masculine and feminine system. That being said, I still get to speak my beloved Spanish because the languages come out to be pretty much the same thing, everyone here who isn't a tourist knows it, and all of the members are Spanish or Latin American.

•The apartment is on the smaller side, especially the kitchen, with one bathroom, but it's nice nonetheless. We've got a slight bug problem around the kitchen, but it's getting better. The bed's comfy.

•I live in a hamlet just below Andorra la Vella called Sant Julià de Lòria. We mainly work in La Vella, La Massana (the place is crazy rich with a gondola in the center constantly taking mountain bikers and hikers up into the mountains), and Sant Julia. We have one person on track to be baptized in September, but she's on vacation, so we have the occasional video call with her. Everything else is pretty much a blank slate. It seems that I've run into a blank slate in pretty much every area of my mission. Interesting how that happens.

I'm still just getting accustomed to my surroundings and moving right a long. It feels like August just started, but we're already 14 days in.

Well! This email has been everywhere, but then again, so have I. Next week's will probably be a little more collected and organized, but in the meantime I would just like to leave you with a little personal report:

For personal study I've started doing what President Nelson challenged YSA to do during his worldwide devotional in the January of 2017: Study everything regarding Jesus Christ. This is accomplished basically by going through and underlining every scripture reference under the heading "Jesus Christ" and every sub-heading included. I remember seeing that and thinking that I'd like to do that one day. Well, since I had recently finshed the little project that I had been doing with the Book of Mormon, I was at a crossroads as to what I should study next. Something sparked a memory of that challenge and I decided that I had the time and means to follow through with it. It's pretty time consuming! I've tried to limit myself to doing this for just 15 minutes, but almost every time I've unexpectedly exceeded that time limit by another 15 minutes. I like it a lot. It's the most in-depth study I've ever done on the topic of the Savior. I've already come to greater appreciate the different perspectives that the various authors of the New Testament provide in light of the life of Christ, the Sermon on the Mount, His commission to the apostles, and other things that I had never really focused on or analyzed before.

Jesus is the Christ. He lives. It is through His Atonement that we can be cleansed from sin, lifted up in our struggles, and return to the presence of God. I'm happy to be in His service. Especially in this new mountain home. 

Have a good week! In the meantime, I'll just keep staring open-mouthed at my surroundings.

Elder Jensen :)