Week 74 - Valenciennes Sees Miracles

We made caramel au beurre salé

Hello family!

Can I just express one more time how excited I am to be done writing these emails haha. I mean there's a Soeur who went home in November still going strong writing weekly emails but like no way Jose. Sorry in advance Reese.

But since I still have the chance to write you guys I guess I should be grateful and make the best of it and have a positive attitude and all that other stuff I've learned about in the last 17 months haha.

So yeah.

Two stories to share.

One comes from last week but I forgot and it needs to be shared. MIRACLE. So last Saturday we were trying to make lunch but realized our shredded emmental cheese that we stole from the elders' now vacant apartment had gone moldy! What are soeurs to do! We came up with something else but during our trajet home we were trying to decide what we wanted for dinner and everything involved cheese! So we tried to stop by Carrefour but it was closed! We resolved to just make quiche pockets without cheese so I started cracking eggs and Soeur Gilbert grabbed some other stuff from the fridge. INCLUDING A BAG OF EMMENTAL! It was definitely out there by angels. We called it the miracle cheese and shared that as our miracle of the week in district meeting. #valenciennesseesmiracles.

This week was good but I don't really have anything interesting to share until Sunday! Actually the week was a little rough- plans just kept falling through and it was a little frustrating.

So Saturday night we got a call from the dmp [ward mission leader] to tell us that church
was cancelled. CHURCH! [apparently the heat in the chapel was not working] We were dying about that haha like literally everything fixed from the week had fallen through including dmp and conseil de paroisse [ward council], that we have every week. And CHURCH was cancelled haha. Raged a little but then we got over it. So we started calling leaders to figure out what to do and long story short we ended up going to Lille for church! It was super weird because we didn't know anyone, didn't have to do anything, didn't have amis to wait for/watch over. We called it vacation. Plus we got to see other missionaries! And I met Henri-Paul Doit, one of Dad's companions! He says hi Dad!

With Bishop Doit in Lille

Elder Doit and Elder Hansen - Montauban, France 1979

So then we get to the gare to take our train back... The train broke down! They made a couple announcements and then finally were like "the next train's at 18h35. Get off" haha. So we had to wait like 40 minutes. We called our DL who's in Lille because they were going to try and get us some stuff for a member in Valenciennes and asked them to bring us some apples cause we were hungry and they had that haha. So they show up at the gare half an hour later with a bag of food - apples, oranges, a granola bar, a sleeve of cookies, a baguette and a pizza they'd just taken out of the oven haha. Best DL ever award. That time going to church took the entire day.

Today we took some pictures (miracle in itself), did our normal tour around the mall, and made caramel that a JA in Rennes used to make that Soeur Gilbert had the recipe for! Yay! Caramel au beurre salé. [caramel with salted butter]

So yeah. I think that's everything!

LOVE you guys!

Soeur Hansen