ELDER GABRIEL JENSEN: Against the Odds

January 6, 2014

"Familie,

Well the first of the week went really fast and was a lot of fun...I'll tell more later. As you know we had transfer call this week. It's pretty uncommon to be with your companion for three transfers. So the call came Friday, and we are BOTH staying. Yes that is right, we are staying together another transfer! This will be our 4th transfer together in Pforzheim. We were a little surprised I guess you could say, apparently this NEVER happens, ha. But I'm excited for this new transfer. I really want this transfer to be a good one!

We went to the Schwarzwald (black forest) last P-day and took this lift thing up to the top in Bad Wildbad where there is all these different walking trails and it is "beautiful!" There is a little ski resort and huge evergreens reaching so high to the sky, and sometimes they make an archway to walk through! We even encountered some snow! The schwarzwald is really pretty! There was this one peak that looked out over the back side of the schwarzwald where you could just see hills infested with evergreens. The hill we were on was called Sommerberg (summer mountain), you should look it up!

Tuesday was Silvester or New Years. We went to the Senters for that and had a little party. We had smoked salmon from Norway on bread, that was good! We listened to some music and watched the New Years thing they have in Berlin on TV - like America has in New York. Once midnight strikes it's like being in a full out battle field! Fireworks are really cheap here and everyone buys them and lets them off at the same time! Literally everywhere you look fireworks are going off, explosions all around you! It's crazy!! Blanks are allowed too so a bunch of Germans were running around with guns shooting blanks, haha kind of scary! We were safe up on the Sentner's balcony. The ride home was crazy, most of the craziness was over but somewhat still going on. The streets were covered with debris from all the boxes of fireworks and firecrackers (which over here are like dynamites). Driving home we were going slow, swerving and honking the horn to dodge the fireworks still going off! The next day though was a ghost town! The streets were a mess! We made contact with this new guy, in a neighboring town this week. He was really nice, we met him by trying to meet with his older brother who is a less active. Hopefully we can meet with him more. Church was really good this week, good lessons all around and a great testimony meeting.

I still can't get over me and Elder Peterson are staying together!

Love you all and Bis Nachste Woche

Elder Jensen"