Pouring Rain in Banja Luka

    I don't know if I'll be able to write much this week, we're leaving early and going to Mostar today. This week was pretty good. We met a lot of new people and had some really successful tracting experiences.

    We went on exchanges with the Elders in Banja Luka, it rained the whole time, but was still pretty good. Banja Luka is the capitol of the "Republic of Serbia", which is a part of Bosnia that thinks it's Serbia. People there don't really like Americans, but they still have a really great branch there with a bunch of awesome families.

    

Me and Elder Stuart in Banja Luka,

 in an Elevator after we just walked home,

in the pouring rain, without umbrellas.

On Tuesday we decided to sleep outside, because our apartment has a super big balcony. We realized, too late, that we picked the wrong night to sleep outside. That night, Bosnia was playing Slovakia in soccer, and the winner of the game made it into the world cup. The game ended at like 11.00. The coolest part was whenever they scored. We live just a little up the hill from the center of the city, and whenever there was a goal you could first hear all of our neighbors cheer, and then a second later the noise from the center of the city hit. Everyone sits at outdoor caffes and bars and watches the game in center, and all of the restaurants and caffe-bars have TV's with the game on. So whenever there was a goal it sounded like the city just errupted, and there are just so many people packed into a dense city (not like big spread out American cities) it's super loud, and then a lot of people just start shooting guns, and that's super loud. After the game ended (and Bosnia won) everyone just got in thier cars and drove around honking for a few hours. That lasted till like 1 in the morning, and then after that it started raining. There is a little roof over the part of the balcony where our beds were, so we didn't get directly rained on, but it was still rather moist.

    My companion Elder Wade is super cool. He is from Gilbert Arizona. He's just a couple inches shorter that me, so we often get comments about how tall we both are. He's almost done with his mission and goes home in the middle of November. I realized that I came out exactly a year after him, and then I realized that I've been on a mission for almost a year! I can't believe it's already been that long! He really likes playing the piano and is really good. We both have very similar sarcastic and whitty personalities, and a very similar sense of humour, so we get along pretty well.

    For dad, we sometimes can get ahold of an Ensign, and we get every month's Liahona. We drive a 4 door Opel Corsa, bright red. We call it the Red Baron, it has an engine like a vacuum cleaner (and I thought Jerry had a hard time going up hills) and could get out accelerated by cow, it also has a terrible transmission, which is super annoying sometimes. The good thing about it is that it's small and easy to parallel park on tiny European streets.

 I love you guys.

Schyler

Our car in the background

We saw this super creepy sign driving back from Banja Luka.

To take the second picture we did a self timer, and set the camera 

on the top of the car and propped it into the right position with a chunk of grass.

We saw this cute little dog while we were walking,
and it looked super skinny and we felt bad,
so we went to a nearby corner market and bought it some hot dogs.