Elder Ian James Smith

 January 27, 2025 Hello how is everyone?  My week was great! Fun fact the letter R can not be pronounced here in France. We teach an English class every Friday night which is super fun. There's all different types of levels. We went through alphabet pronunciation and the letter R gets pronounced haree haeure errrreeew. All in all it was a great week for missionary work. We had 5 friends at church this Sunday which was super awesome. We found the most elect person ever on the tram and she is super excited to learn more.  Last p day we went to the temple and found out that the name Hodgkiss is also a name that is difficult to pronounce. The temple is super super amazing and I am super blessed to have the opportunity to go every week. Right now I'm in line at SAINT-CHAPEL and am super excited to see the cool stained glass. One of the funnest things to do is taking trains and metros everywhere we go !! We also had a super dope member meal the other night at this American fami...

 January 21, 2025 Hi all!!! It's our district p-day so on the to do list today is going to the temple and a world war 2 museum so I'm pumped for that.  This week was low-key pretty slow but I'll run through some highlights of our week. Tuesday we had an incredibly elect lesson with our friend and one of our members. Both our member and our friend know the scriptures. There were soo many scriptures shared it was awesome. The spirit was there and it was a great lesson!! Another awesome thing that happened is with one of our friends who has a baptismal date (Martin) we went to this really cool parc called Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. I've went once before but not with our friend. We talked and it was a great time we hit him with the 2 great commandments and a couple other principles. Here is a flic of us together at the parc. Such a dope parc !!!!!!! All in all fun week, but definitely a slow week. We also met the most elect person of all time on the tram. I hopped on the tra...

January 13, 2025   6 Months ?????? I hit my 6 month mark the other day and can confidently say that this has been one of the greatest experiences of my entire life! A little recap, I started in Chartes for 2 transfers, met so many amazing people and was able to be a part of Peter's baptism there. I had a blast with my two trainers Elder Rowley who is my mission Dad and Elder Wilstead who finished my training.  Then I got transferred to Paris, the Les Lilas sector with Elder Tupana who is from Tahiti, These last two transfers have been a blast with him. I've learned so much in these last 6 months and grown so much.  We had an amazing Sunday yesterday! We were able to bring 5 friends to church! Little story, we had a friend who said he would come to church call us during the sacrament so me and Elder Tupana silenced our phones and as soon as we finished the sacrament we bolted for the door and called our friend. It turned out that he had gotten lost in the metro, so me...

 January 6, 2025 Salut tout le monde!  I hope your week has been great and happy new year. I hope that you are doing well.  I had an amazing week here in Les Lilas. It started really on Tuesday when I had one of the wildest member meals of all time. We went to Alex's house, who is our ward mission leader. So we get to his house and he has a full setup for the new year there was little gun poppers full of confetti. And the first course that was rolled out was Escargot, below is a photo. So there is butter and some seasoning but how you get these snails out is with a tooth pick and it's like a chewy chicken flavor that I can still taste. It's wild, low key, not horrible but it's not something I will willingly eat again. During this night we listened to American music from the 80s and got some dope hats and wine without alcohol so yeah that was a hype night then we low key sprinted home because we were late.  We set a baptismal date for February with our friend Mar...

 December 30, 2024 Joyeux Noël à tous. Merry Christmas everyone I hope you had a great time. Paris was cool for Noël. We went to a Christmas market on our P-Day that was super fun! The amount of Mariah Carey Christmas songs was insane. Throughout the week we had a lot of lessons planned. Not all happened but the ones that did happen were very elect and awesome.  On Thursday I had an exchange with Elder Butler from Nogent on Thursday which was super cool. We had this thing called "racklet" for dinner. It's very very french but essentially you take this special cheese and put it under this hot stone then you take meat and put it on top of the hot stone. Once the cheese is melted and the meat is cooked you take the cheese and pour it over potatoes and put your cooked meat over the potatoes too. It's crazy good! I have a photo of me and Elder Butler eating it down below.  Also it's soo cold here in Paris like all the time. But it's been fun and I love all the expe...