So I was reminded that I didn't blog on my travel blog about the whole reason I went up to Denmark, EFY. So let's give it another go and see if I can be less forgetting now ;) Caution: this may be a bit long because it was a long weekend and rather eventful...
If anyone has ever been to Denmark they much know, surely they must, that there are some cute guys up there am I right? Oh, and tall! haha!
From my ward coming to this event was 4 different people, Sara (That's me), Stephanie (another YSA), Caleb and Suzy (Young Married Couple). Stephanie and myself traveled up together to go to this weekend. We got there about 0800 and didn't have to be at the training until 1900. So what do two blonde girls do with almost 11 hours of free time? DUH! They go exploring!
We had some trouble getting train tickets, my card was declined, her card was declined, we were panicking, I found an ATM and tried my card in it and it finally worked. We were both relieved. We were a bit scared because of course Germany doesn't sell Danish Krones and we would have been lacking of money the entire weekend.
So we finally get money, we get a train ticket and off we go, by this time it's about 1000 when we finally get to the center train station and lock up our bags. Thank heavens for baggage lockers. We didn't want to lug those things around Copenhagen all weekend. So we went off travelling and that is all documented at "Where in the World..."
The important part to skip to is that Caleb and Suzy didn't travel in with us, Caleb couldn't come until Saturday and Suzy was on a later flight. Suzy had never travelled by herself and asked us to come and get her from the airport, so at about 1430 we head back into the airport and look for Suzy. We find her with 5 other YSAs from Nurnberg Stake, another Stake that was invited to this EFY. Stephanie was a bit crabby and tired from walking all over the city all day so whenever anyone asked her anything she blew up on them... It was hard to watch.
So we get them all situated it was hard really because they were panicking about time and money and yeah, it was hard.
So we head back to the train and at the time it seemed that we were going to go to the temple and see it, but when we got to the place we were going to drop our bags back off they decided no, so Stephanie and I had to grab our bags and we just switched trains.
Stephanie was told how to get to the place of EFY differently than the other counselors were told, so we had some disagreements on this. We went with the crowd however and well, we ended up getting on the wrong bus but eventually we made it to EFY, a whole 90 minutes Early. Stephanie and myself are worn from walking all day, we feel dirty, we smell dirty and I'm sure people thought we were dirty. Finally things get started and that night we were going over what would happen the first night.
Monday is the first day, so of course FHE is the first activity pretty much. We went through FHE lessons and then FHE games. EFY games really are fun! We played this one staring game where you could blink, but you can't look away, you can't smile and you can't laugh. So it gets down to 6 people and I got paired up with this girl. The other two matches were already won, but me and this girl were standing there for 5 mins before they finally called our match and paired us up with the other two winners which happened to be guys and both of us girls won. Big shock huh? The rest of the weekend I was called Stone Face. I take it as a compliment. :)
Friday they had split us up into our groups and our group happened to be called the Forbidden Fruits; kind of works doesn't it? So here I am being a Forbidden fruit not knowing anyone in my group and not 100% sure on what it is I'm doing at EFY. Needless to say that Friday was a little difficult to get through.
Saturday was a good day, aside from waking up at 0430 because the sun is shining and because it was freezing in the room. Today was the day we were going to go through rotations of workshops, do the banner/cheer, and play the games. Another day out in the sun!
The banner/cheer started off good, again, with being a fruit we had some fun for that. Being forbidden our moto was "Don't Eat Twice!" :) We played games during the morning, painted our banner and made up our cheer. We went to lunch to let the paint dry and well, to get some food!
When we came back from lunch I was standing by Suzy waiting for our turns to come to do our cheer when all the sudden this guy comes up to me and is all, "Do you remember Elder Bradshaw and Horn?" to which I was OF COURSE... he continued, Westerman? and of course I remembered him too. I was looking at him though going, I have no idea who you are though. Of course I didn't tell him this. But it was ok because he never served in my area.
Turns out that they had Zo-Co one night and when they do that they all get together and play volleyball at the church. I happened to be there that night and he told me he remembered me from that night. Even had it pictured in his head down to the shirt I was wearing. He said he had been looking at me all morning trying to figure out where I was from in his past.
We were introduced that night, but of course that was about two years ago Ok! I still didn't remember him. He said he introduced himself as Elder K because it's a danish name and hard to say. Nope...
All day I was racking my brain trying to figure out if I really did remember him just not ya know, remember him. So I asked him of course to mess his hair the way it would have been done on his mission. Looked more familiar but at that point I did remember meeting an elder from Denmark because I thought it was the coolest thing ever and I do recall talking to him about Arizona because he was the comp at the time of Elder Horn who was from Arizona too.
So from that point of the evening on we were lost in conversation... No nothing mushy. just talking about random things. It was good, I learned a lot of myself that night along with a lot of him. We were talking about my school and what I was going to do this fall. I told him I needed to get home to finish my education but nothing felt like it was the right decision. For some reason he asked me if I ever thought about studying abroad. I have, but more for my doctorate. *
Remember this, it comes into play later*So it was time for our nightly devotional and off we both went to our respected dorms. Don't worry, we hung out on Sunday too. He wowed me with his knowledge of the scriptures and church. Not that I thought he wouldn't, but he had some really good thoughts on different things.
During these meetings we have a testimony meeting, of course and it was so powerful the spirit that day. I am happy that I went to training. I learned a lot, my love for the gospel grew and I realized that there are good people in the church out there. Maybe not in Germany, but they are out there.
I'm so excited for EFY, it's only 6 and a half weeks away! I feel like there is so much to get done, but I'm ready to do it. I want to be the best counselor for these girls, and that will take preparations. What I do know though is that I will have girls 16+ because then we can be sure that they speak english. Youth younger than that may or may not speak english.
So when I said to remember the part about studying abroad here is why: I came home and told my mom about my weekend, of course we were talking about it for a minute but it was good. I mentioned this studying abroad thing and she stopped me there, told me she had an impression made on her this weekend that I don't necessarily have to study in Arizona, I can study abroad.
I've come to learn that when something like this happens you should listen to the promptings, so it's definitely something I'm going to look into. This weekend was just such a powerful one, a revealing one and an exciting one. I can't wait to get to the real EFY and see what changes can come from a whole week of gospel principles.
I liked it, but with the kids in the background and the directors hand in the middle of the side I really didn't want to leave it as that. So I adjusted and edited it to look more like this:
And I did this all with the silly program of Paint; not nearly as good as Photo-shop. It is now that I'm starting to really want to edit my pictures that I see the need for photo-shop. The only problem I can see with this is the price of about 400-1000$$! Yeah, that's a hard one to swallow!
