Happy New Year!!

New Year's Eve with one of our families

Our Christmas Tree!

Grandpa, Father, and son!

Christmas Carolers! Our ward missionaries

Ehlert getting a "special" Christmas letter

• I'm Back!‏

Woo! It has been a LONG time! Just between battling sicknesses and the whole Christmas thing and everything, it has been tough to find time to write a long email. But I'm doin it now! Where to begin though... I guess Christmas would be good. I got the Christmas package and everyone said it was the biggest box they've ever seen a missionary receive! Felt pretty awesome. I loved all the gifts! I had a breakfast of champions with some like peaches, instant mashed potatoes, and beef jerky. That was good. Tell the young women thank you for the beef jerky and everything else they gave me! I loved it all! 

Christmas was rather quiet. It came and went. It didn't really even feel like Christmas. It was just way to hot! My favorite present though has been that voice recorder! I LOVE that thing! I've been using it every night! I like it better than just writing cause I get all these comments from Elder Ehlert and everything. They all turn out pretty hilarious! We just get SO off track and just start talkin about random stuff. I love it! We had a good Christmas conference too. The talent show was pretty hilarious! So many "talents" that just made you go, "What?... Why?..." haha There was this one kid who was the son of the woman who makes all the food, and he was an INCREDIBLE beat boxer! EASILY took the entire talent show! He was young too. No older than 13. SO sweet! 

We have been teaching a lot and meeting a ton of new people! We had 11 new investigators last week! Crazy! They are all progressing really well too. I'm beginning to understand more and more Tagalog. I now only have to have people repeat what they say twice instead of three times. Quite the accomplishment. 

Oh! I had a dentist appointment this last week! That was fun! We had to go all the way to Manila and then we found out that the dentist was like WAY backed up. Took a few hours but we finally got my filling and got back to work. The office was actually super nice. Pretty much the same as in America actually. Except that it only cost me 800 pesos ($17). So it was just a LITTLE cheaper than America! haha! The dentist lady was really nice too. Made sure I was doin good and just started drilling away. 

New Years was also a lot of fun. A ton of members wanted to have us over so Elder Ehlert and I had like 4 meals in 5 hours. And they weren't small meals either.. I'm still full from it. I just gotta say that I never thought I would enjoy real cheese as much as I did yesterday. And ham. And grapes. You just don't get those things too often here and it seriously tasted like heaven. Along with some REAL chocolate cake!!! They usually just call brown bread "chocolate" but the stuff we had last night was legit. SO good! Ya, we had curfew at 7 and we ended up just playing with those card games that I got for Christmas for a few hours. The fireworks were insane. They started at about 10 and went until 1 in the morning. The GIANT fireworks they have in America for the Fourth of July are only like 20 bucks a piece here, so EVERYONE puts on their own firework shows. There were multiple people lighting off on our street. We were RIGHT under these huge fireworks! Sorta frightening actually. But ya, getting to sleep was super hard. Had to wrap two shirts and my pillow around my head to block out some of the sound. Crazy. 

Well, that's about it for the past three weeks. I'm sorry, I probably forgot a BUNCH of stuff, but it's hard to remember everything from the past three weeks! Just know that I've been writing, and now talking, every night so it's all recorded. Just not in these big emails..... 

Love you all! More next week!

Elder Krueger

Patrick sent some audio journal entries and has some great stories. I am going to attempt to transcribe some of them and I will add them here soon. Wish me luck!