54th email from France (the Bureau)

Hey Everyone, Thanks for your emails. It sounds like you had a good week, us too. It went by really fast. I just got back from a garage in a little town called Puget. I had to take one of our cars there to get some problems fixed. Tomorrow we have a little perk of the bureau-Road Trip- well, kind of. We’re going down to Bèzier, a little town where the missionaries are moving so we’re going to bring the big van and help them move all the stuff. It should be fun. It’s going to be just me and Elder Wright. He’s my colleague now. Elder Mendenhall left this morning on the train to go to Montpellier for the next 3 weeks before he dies. I guess President didn’t want him to finish in the bureau so he sent him there. He was way happy because he was there for 6 months about a year ago so he already knows everybody. So now it’s just me and Elder Wright and only 4 in the bureau so that will be a little better. It’s going to be harder for the missionary work though, I think, because it was him that knew everything about the people we see and teach. I had a rendez-vous with President and a guy from SFR, a phone company, and we negotiated a whole new contract for the whole mission. We’ll be seeing him again this week to talk about the final prices and all that but it was a cool experience just to talk about all the stuff especially with President who is totally a business man! It’s actually a really good offer and so were gonna see if we could include the mission of Paris with us so I’ll be calling them all week trying to find out information for how many phones they have working and how much time they would need to change. Last night we ate with the Ficquet family. It was really good. They have a son who’s about to put in his papers so it was cool to talk to him. Then we ate this tuna tomato tart with cheese. It sounds weird but actually was very good. I’m pretty sure she invited us over because as soon as she found out I’m from Louisiana she realized she could use me to find her long lost member cousins she found while doing her genealogy so now I have 2 names of dead people from Morgan city I’m supposed to give to somebody to see if they still have family lines in the church! So that's gonna be cool. Caussé came this week. It was really good. Him and his wife talked. I talked to the wife about y’all being there. She said the trip was really good and that it was cool to meet all the members there. She also talked a lot about how nice it was to speak to us in French not English. Oh, I got your package today, thanks! Actually I haven’t had time to open it yet Oh yeah, you have to put mission or elder or something on the address when you send me stuff. We have this super pissy always- angry mail lady that absolutely hates us and today I could see the fire in her eyes as she asked if it was for us or the other people in the building cause it’s not like pogue is marked anywhere. But everyday she storms in, leaves the mail then storms out and if she has questions or has to get us to sign things it’s just like she’s ready to fight! It’s really dumb because we’re always super nice to her. As for our apartment, yeah it’s on the fourth floor above the bureau and it’s super big and nice. The square here is really cool. The Compans Caffarelli is all offices. There’s always business people walking around then the apartment is the only one I’ve ever had with like real framed pictures on the walls and paint and all that- just very nice. The whole city here is really artsy and cool, except our section has some really bad big (a certain religion named) areas just huge buildings that we try to avoid because they pretty much hate us. There’s one that we’re not allowed to go to because they got the car stolen one time then the tires cut another time. Then the other ones we only go to if we have meetings. I keep thinking about Alex going on his mission. Madagascar’s going to be so different. Elder Mendenhall had a colleague from there and he was always talking about just how his culture was so weird. Well, thanks for all the emails everybody. I’ll try to send some pictures later maybe. I don’t have my camera right now. Go ahead and call the BYU-Idaho people maybe just to see. Love y’all, Taylor