Sorella Rachel Riley: 18 months in northern Italy: Week 11

It's not often that a missionary in Italy gets a visit from her older sister! Eliza was doing a 2-week study abroad in Turin and rode the train for hours to show up at Rachel's church meeting and have a picnic with her after church!

Greetings from the train. The Italian countryside is beautiful. After staring at it for an hour I decided to do something productive and write this email.

As the subject line says, we get manna. In the form of pasta, cakes, and fresh fruit. Members just like to give the missionaries their extra food, which we don't mind at all. Also, this week we have somehow received three jars of marmalade from various members. I am considering starting the Paddington Bear diet (JK and I think only Dad will even get it). Our kitchen table and fridge are packed, and if we weren't out of toilet paper we wouldn't even go grocery shopping this week. Also, we spend all our grocery money to buy baking ingredients to make things that rarely turn out edible. We did make a successful batch of cookies, to deliver to our neighbors and get to know them but we ended up eating them all so we'll try that again later.

I wrote so much about food because I don't have much else to write about, I wasn't super great at logging my experiences this week, but we did do missionary work, I promise!

Saturday morning, we had an appointment with an old man in the park. We showed up but he did not. So we decided to go talk to people. We ended up talking to a grandma and her grandson for a while. We offered her a BOM but she said she has a problem with her eyes, so she can't read. The 11 yr old boy piped up and said that he could give it to his dad who loves to read religious books. This kid is Awesome! He also had a ton of questions about the pictures in the pamphlets. He's a cool kid. We concluded after that we weren't supposed to be there to teach A, but we needed to be there at that time to find those people.

We taught some other lessons and did a 30 min bike ride in 15 mins. It hurt but felt good when we got to the bus station in time, so it was very much worth the pain. I am also working on a farmer's tan worthy to rival Dad's.

Eliza came to my branch on Sunday and we had lunch together. That was fun. And President-Allen-approved.

Since transfer calls are this week, we did Transfer Predictions at district meeting with Kinder eggs and the Old Testament. We concluded that G will be training again, and since he will have the same parents as me, I'm getting a brother! But maybe we just read the kinder egg toys and Bible verses wrong, we'll find out soon!

New missionary conference was great! We went over a bunch of things they already told us the day we arrived and had some other trainings. It was good to see people from my MTC zone! It concluded with a sprint through the Milano train station.

Funny embarrassing story from the conference: I used the restroom and was looking for how to flush the toilet, since Italians usually don't put the flush button on the actual toilet. So I saw this string and decided to pull it because that looked like a logical way to flush the toilet. It turns out that was an emergency call for help string that rang buzzers throughout the building. Now I know (and every other missionary who was there knows too) which lever actually flushes the toilet.

Anyways, life is good! I'm constantly learning so much and letting Heavenly Father be part of every aspect of my life. This church is true, Christ's gospel is restored, and Heavenly Father looks out for His missionaries!

I am so grateful for y'all's prayers and words of encouragement.

Sending lots of love from Forlì, Italia!

Sorella Rachel Riley

Pics!

My absolute favorite type of sandwich. Tomato, pesto, and mozzarella. / I found a book about a foreign land. It looks cool, I would like to visit it one day.