Fat cats and absurd amounts of lasagna (sounds like a Garfield comic book)

My dear family and friends,

This place is gorgeous. I can't even describe it, it is so beautiful. I just need to bring everyone here later and then you would see how amazing it is, but for now, just imagine the alps one direction, green mountains the other, and flower covered cottages and trees and lakes and sunflower and hay feilds in between. Amazing. Hard for contacting, but gorgeous. Everytime I walk out the door, I just think, yeah, I live here. See that village full of cottages and flowers? yeah, I'm porting that. So cool. I feel like I have seen such variety on my mission. Carcassonne was pretty and had a giant castle, St Etienne was modern city and here is gorgeous with mountains and villages out of postcards. Anyways, this week, I watched a mission video about how to drive in France and S Christensen has told me stuff about driving stick and demonstrated a little (most of it didnt make sense and Ill probably make her repeat it 6 times or so). So this week, at some point, I'll probably actually get behind the wheel. I'll be sure to tell you how that goes. Also this week, about eight flies were in our apartment and we got to watch S Loder swat them. It was actually really exciting. It felt almost like I was watching an action movie. She would barely miss one and it would fly away and then we would all sit in our chairs looking around trying to find it again. And then one of us would see one and everyone would watch as S loder tried to sneak up on it. It was great. We live in the basement of a members house (they are awesome) and they have three cats. One has gray stripes and whenever she sees you, will practically roll over trying to get away from you and then if you succeed in petting her, will sit on your shoe until you nudge her away. Another one is black and naps on top of the lawn mower almost all day. Sometimes we will leave at around luch and then come back for dinner and she will still be there just napping. The last one is this fat gray one, who apparently gets even fatter during the summer. Its kinda hard to imagine what she would be like fatter. This week we got to attend a french wedding (we were allowed to because of the amount of nonmembers there and it was a chance to do service) which was beautiful. It was cool because some people were wearing top hats and carrying fancy canes. I was suprised to not find anyone wearing a monocle. Yesterday, we had church where I anounced over the pulpit that I am from Iowa. I corrected myself, but I've had tons of members tease me about it already. This ward is huge. Im not used to being in such a gigantic ward in France. And so many of them speak English. The family that lives above us are Italian, so they speak italian, french and english fluently and some spanish. How cool are they? We had lunch at their house yesterday, where we had the best lasagna ever. It was so good, so I ate a lot. Then an hour later, we went to another members house for dinner and we had....... lasagna. By that time, I had eaten so much that I felt ready to burst. Then they placed this giant peice of lasagna in front of me and I could actually feel myself starting to tear up, how in the world was I supposed to fit that into my already full body? After a lot of pain and cutting lasagna and moving it around to make it look like less, I ate enough to not offend anyone. But it was definitely one of the hardest things I had ever done in my life. Do not eat lasagna twice in one day. The other sisters would agree with me.

Well I gotta go. Im glad that everyone is having fun on vacation and I love hearing about how everyone is doing. Lately, I've been asking people for their conversion stories, so please send me letters or emails about how you gained your testimony. I love hearing about those. I love you all so much. God loves everyone and expects big things from each person. Be worthy of his trust. Trust God in everything you do. Je vous aime!!!

Soeur Russell