Hello everyone! Happy New Year! It's been quite a while since my last legitimate weekly update. Sorry about that. Here I am though!

Christmas was fantastic. We visited a friend of ours who bought us lunch-- Turkish Kebab. It was the only shop that was open. Plus, I like kebab anyway. Then we went over to a member's house. She fed us LOTS of filipino food. Oh mamma mia it was soooo good. The night before we went to the Duomo and saw all the lights and music and what not. It was raining a bit, but it actually added a bit of fun to the night. I made so many memories this Christmas that I'll keep forever: caroling with our district almost every night, eating roasted chestnuts (which are actually pretty good), visiting the members of our ward, eating SO MUCH FOOD, our little tiny Christmas tree and the one strand of tinsel over our door, watching the Emperor's New Groove on Christmas morning after opening our little stack of badly wrapped presents to each other, going to give service, the mountain of panettone (Italian fruitcake) in our kitchen, and so many more great times. I am so blessed that I was able to serve in Milano at Christmas-time.

With that being said, the holidays have finished and so has my time in Milano. I spent the morning packing, because tomorrow I'll be moving to Bergamo. Bergamo (Bear-gum-oh) is a city in the mountains about 30 or so miles away from Milano. I'll be living in the mountains! I'm so excited. I've heard it's a great city. Also, I've been called to serve there as a zone leader. I feel really inadequate and a bit nervous. Luckily, my new companion, Anz. Hansen, has been a zone leader there for three transfers already. I look at it really as he'll be re-training me in a sense. I'm really excited for the new opportunities and challenges that lay ahead of me.

Before I get into the spiritual stuff, I figured y'all would appreciate a little language humor. Each foreign-speaking missionary has those moments where they make a blunder in the language and get laughed at for the rest of their life. I was pretty proud of myself because I've been going almost a year now without a super memorable one. No more. Hehe. I laugh at myself in retrospect. Here's some quick Italian grammar so that this will make sense. To intensify a word, you can add suffixes. The letter -one make the word bigger. Example: "porta" means door, so "portone" means big door. You get the picture. Since the word "capo" means boss, I assumed that adding a suffix would make it mean the big boss. I found out that it doesn't work in this case... I used that in a conversation with an investigator and was puzzled by the look of confusion on his face. Later while looking through the dictionary I found that instead of calling his wife the boss as I intended, I referred to her as a castrated chicken. Why those words are so similar, I'd like to know.

Anyway, aside from that, life is going great. I love my mission and will be forever grateful for the lessons that I'm learning and the experiences that I'm having. In leaving Milano, I will be leaving a part of myself behind. There are so many people that have influenced my life for good here, and I hope I've been able to do the same to them. Serving a mission is definitely the best choice I've ever made, despite the difficulties and challenges it contains. I am so excited for this new year ahead of me and this new opportunity to serve God's children in Bergamo. Wherever I am called, I know that it's where God needs me. I know the work that I am doing is from God and I feel his guidance in everything I do. It is an experience like nothing else to put myself completely in God's hands and let Him direct all of my actions. This is His work, not mine, and I am humbled that He has chosen someone as imperfect as I am to do His work.

I love all of you. As always, I thank you for all of the love and support you send me from afar. Without you, this would be near impossible.

Happy 2014. Until next time, Anziano Simcox.