Elder Hopkins in San Jose: Exchanges

This week was great! I went on my first exchange with Elder Reid, he is a zone leader, last Wednesday. It was honestly one of the most fun days I have had on my mission. The zone leaders cover Stanford Campus and it was so fun walking around over there and meeting all of the students. I'll send some pictures from campus, it is way cool looking there. That day we went to our dinner appointment with a member that lived in an area of East Palo Alto I have never been to before, it was really nice, most of EPA is kinda dumpy but this one area was super nice. I learned that the neighborhood was nicknamed "MormonVille" because a lot of members live in that neighborhood, go figure.

There is a new bishop in the 2nd Ward, Bishop Miner, He is really cool, we have been trying to do more work in the second ward because most of it came from the first and he gave us a huge list of names of people to visit to get us started, he seems very missionary work oriented which I am looking forward to.

We have been visiting Pelenaise, a Tongan Woman who we baptized my first week here, and we are teaching her the Recent Convert lessons. She is 82 years old and her English is still a little broken so she calls, Elder Harper, Hama. She calls me Kipson. I am not really sure where that came from but its cool. The rest of the Tongans here call me Hopikini. I guess that is my Tongan name.

We were in East Palo Alto walking to an appointment the other night, around 8. We were stopped by a little girl that wanted to teach us how to Hula (Did I spell that right?). It was awesome we just learned how to hula in the middle of the street, people walked by and stared and stuff, but we did not even care, it was great.

Also another night we ran into a super drunk guy in EPA. He wanted us to drive him home, we said we couldn't but he didn't understand because he couldn't speak English very well.

We tried walking away and he started swearing at us in Spanish, He was so drunk he could barely walk. Luckily one of his friends found him.

I think that is about it. Overall we had a really great week, we taught a lot of lessons, got a lot of contacts, I love you all for your love and support!

I also included pictures from a morning hike and from when Elder Reid got his hair cut in a park, that was weird.

Nate had a second email with some pictures; they did not come through. I am guessing the hike was in this Email.