September 3, 2018

Sorry I left you hanging this last week was pretty crazy.

So on Monday I got to Glasgow. For the next few days I stayed in a trio with two pretty weird dudes. Elder Glad who's been our for 6 months and only served in Shetland. (They tiny little islands way up that are halfway in between Norway and Scotland.) The other Elder is a chinese speaker from my group. He's weird but a really good missionary. So for the 3 whopping days I was there with those two Elder James and I set like 6 people on date and set like 20 appointments. We were on fire, then on Wednesday night I got a call from the assistants being told I needed to go to Limerick.

Now this is the juicy part I'm sure you are dying to know. So I was e-moved because of visa problems with people. The problems started at the beginning of this year when Ireland changed a law in their government that says you can only apply for a visa in your home country. Which meant missionaries weren't able to get garde cards (irish visas) for all of this year. Now when I was in Galway I was told to get my garde card ASAP when getting to Ireland. Because I was lazy I waited about 5 weeks to apply for my card. So I got my visa here a lot later than I should have. Which has given me more time to be in Ireland now. So back to missionaries not being able to get visas this year. So President Donaldson didn't care about the visas, he just shipped everyone to Ireland regardless of visas or not. Eventually he left, and people still went into Ireland without permission and just this last week the government caught on and deported all of the people without visas. So there were about 70 emergency moves. The few Americans that have visas were sent here and all of the British and European elders and sisters are in Ireland now because they need permission to be here.

So all day Friday I traveled from Glasgow to Dublin taking 3 hours of ferry and 10 hours of buses. It was fun coming over here though because I just chilled with Elder Baake and another Elder that's really cool. So after all that I spent the night in Dublin, left for Limerick the next day and pretty much just unpacked and chilled when I got here.

The other Elders that are in Limerick came on Sunday and none of have food so we all went out to McDonalds for dinner at around 7ish and we ordered 100 chicken nuggets with a mcflurry each. It was super fun. After showing them the city we went to their flat and spent the night, and it was an absolute blast. We stayed up to like 3 just fooling around playing card games, learning magic tricks, and trying to solve rubiks cubes haha. The other Elders here are Elder Garrick and Elder Kilgour. Garrick is from American Fork, Utah and Kilgour is from somewhere in England.

My comp is English as well and I really like him. He's super chill and works pretty hard so I can't be upset at all.

Catch yah around, love yah.

Elder Erik Orchard