March 2, 2015 - In which there are a lot of opinions

 Dear family,

Last week was pretty exciting! Elder Foster is still waiting for his new companion (he should be coming this week, supposedly!) so we spent the whole week in a tripanionship. It's been exciting, and we've spent a lot of time on splits with members trying to cover everything in our two areas, which has led me to feel a little dazed and confused :) Adding just one companion also seems to add about ten times as many opinions about EVERYTHING, especially the things that aren't very important. It's been exciting.

The members and investigators here caught wind that it was my birthday on Thursday. They somehow learned how to make angel food cake from scratch and stripe it blue and gold for Ravenclaw (somebody noticed that about half of all my clothes have Ravenclaw colors) and made it for dessert at family home evening on Monday. They also gave me a Czech copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (they somehow found that that's my favorite Harry Potter book). It was a funny surprise. Some of them also came to lunch on Thursday with us.

Tuesday we had a great zone conference! The Missionary Department sent us Meet the Mormons, so that was a good chunk of our training. We also spent a long time talking about the Book of Mormon, and we had a lot of great insights about what sort of a positive influence it can have on someone.

We had a really interesting Sunday yesterday. We were travelling almost all day, from picking up an investigator in a town 30 minutes away and riding the train with them to church to visiting a graveyard with another investigator because it was the six-month anniversary of his mother's death to taking a trip to a town two-and-a-half hour train ride away to visit a member. I'm a little over time so I can't regale you with all the details, but it was really tiring (and really uplifting at the same time).

H is still doing really well. He's continuing to grow and is recognizing positive ways that he's been changing. At one meeting we made a list of ways that he's changed during his teaching process. He's very committed to living the commandments. As soon as he understands something, he is very eager to do it!

Thanks for all the love and support! I'm out of time, but lots of love!

Elder Boyce

Some of the YSA managed somehow to make me a Ravenclaw-striped angel food cake at FHE! (Elder Foster in the background)

A gift for me????

A gift!!!! A Czech copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows!

Playing Harry Potter Catchphrase at YSA FHE.

​Birthday lunch with some YSA (how did Elder Foster get into all of these pictures?)

​A sweet cathedral that we saw tracting

​It's been suddenly really warm this last week (and by warm I mean about four degrees Celsius) here in Olomouc, but yesterday we went and visited someone in the frozen north!

​A member from Plzeň (the other side of the country) was up in a spa town because her son just had surgery and in the Czech Republic they sometimes diagnose a month at a spa as recovery for surgery. President McConkie assigned us to bring them the Sacrament because we're the closest branch. The town (Jeseník) is a two-and-a-half-hour train ride from Olomouc, so we spent 5-6 hours travelling yesterday. Jeseník had gorgeous views, though, and it was a nice visit. You could see the clouds swirling at a million miles an hour.

You can't see the other mountain (from our train window) because it's snowing so much​.