The Home Stretch to the MTC

We had our last language tutoring sessions with the Senior MTC staff last week.  We appreciate the help of these great young people and our native speaker so much.  We leave for the mission field with much more confidence than we had in early February.  Now we are a bit afraid of the MTC because we will have to study Preach My Gospel in English and we have been working in Dutch for the last three months.

We had another inspiring Skype meeting with Elder Brent and Sister Suzanne Romig now serving in Groningen.  They have provided much useful information and certainly inspire us every time we visit with them.  We hope we can do half as well as they have done.

They also told us that we had a "penthouse" apartment in a new apartment building in Mechelen.  After a bit of research, we were able to find an older rental listing with some pictures.

Kitchen

Living/Dining Area

Another view

Bathroom

The Apartment Building - just finished

Somehow, finding the pictures, made it more real.  They are working on getting the furniture in now.  I suspect most of the apartments are furnished in Ikea.  We appreciate the hard work of Elder Robison in trying to get everything set up for our arrival.

We are speaking in Sacrament Meeting in the Washington Fields 11th Ward at 1:00 PM on May 31.  It is the southernmost of the two buildings located together on Washington Fields Road.  This will be our second talk and since the first was on Mothers Day in Island Park, we can't "recycle" our talks.  I guess we better get used to this.

A week filled with information

This week, we received an email from Elder Robison, in the Belgium Netherlands Mission office informing us that our address in Belgium will be Van Kerckhovenstraat 8 bus 501, 2800 Mechelen, Belgium.  We looked it up on Google Maps and discovered that it is close to the train station and only about 15 minutes from the Brussels Airport.

We also used Google Streetview to see that there were several new buildings under construction when the street view image was taken last year.  We assume that our apartment is in one of those buildings.

This week, we also received an email from the MTC indicating that we should check in around 10:00 AM on Monday, June 1.  We also learned that we will have a queen size bed and private bathroom.  Our training should finish at 4:30 PM each day and on Friday, June 5, we will be released at 3:30 PM.

Missionary travel also informed us that we are booked on a non-stop flight from Salt Lake to Amsterdam.  Delta started this flight on May 1, so we feel very blessed to have such a convenient travel schedule.

We now have three weeks left before entering the MTC and we are feeling a bit pressed for time to get everything set up.