Week 94: -14: Ako Maďar

In a past email, I mentioned that some people had mistaken me as a Hungarian because of my accent, which I took as a compliment, because as long as they couldn't recognize any American I was in the clear. But I recently learned that if you want to criticize one's ability to speak Slovak, you can say, "You speak like a Hungarian." But to the Hungarians' defense, their language seems to me much harder than Slovak. 

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Who would be excited for a new handbook of rules and standards? Only missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After nine years, they finally came out with a new booklet of guidelines to replace the somewhat out-of-date missionary handbook. It's definitely more principle-based and less oriented around rules. 

For example, in the old handbook was written that if we play basketball, we can only play at half-court. This was one way to keep the game from getting competitive, thus avoiding injury or extreme fatigue. However, in the new handbook, we find this guideline: "Play sports in ways that avoid injury and extreme fatigue." Nothing is specifically stated about only playing half-court. 

I think this new approach will help us be more spiritually self-reliant rather than needing to rely on written rules to tell us what is appropriate and what isn't. That being said, not all the rules have been replaced by principles...

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Sunday happened as it usually does in Banská Bystrica; we forgot to assign talks in advance, so Elder Clayton and I prepared "surprise talks" for the fourth time in a row. They're honestly not much of a surprise at this point. Regardless, we survived again. 

During the second hour, one of our members was talking about how it was her dream to one day serve in the temple. However, because the nearest temple is currently in Germany, she wanted to wait for the one in Budapest to be constructed.

"I'll learn Hungarian so I could serve there," she said. 

"I'll learn it with you!" someone else chimed in.

"But you already speak like a Hungarian," I said. Boom, roasted.

So I have more photos, but they'll have to wait.