It's a Besonderes Life: An Austrian Wedding, [One,eins,uno x2,egy,wti], and a Flash Mob

To the Best Family in All the World!

It has been another wonderful week filled with new experiences of which there never seem to be an end. Although there have been several weddings that have taken place here in the last 14 months, few of them were with YSA's that we had really gotten to know well. But on Friday a young lady that we know very well was taking the big step with a young man she had met at a YSA conference held at a city in the middle of Austria known as Linz just this past spring. One of our trainers back in the MTC at Provo had noted that we were heading to Austria and had been involved in her teaching and baptism and asked us to look out for her. She is the only member of her family but her fiance' comes from a good strong Mormon family. The wedding itself in Austria is always first a civil affair with the temple sealing following. Bishops and Stake Presidents are not granted the privilege of marrying according to Austrian law. (We expect this may happen in the states as well if same-sex weddings become a civil right.) So we were informed that the wedding was on Friday morning but in a somewhat remote suburb to the north east of Vienna. Apparently it is a busy marriage season here in July and all of the local officials in both Linz and Vienna were booked up for several weeks. So rather than delay for a long time they elected to get married where an official was available sooner. The marriage wasn't until 11:00 but we were advised to be there early and there was a good crowd there already by the time we arrived at 10.

Formal occasions all operate on an individual basis, as do church meetings and many were there in a variety of dress standards with few full suits or dressy dresses and even a few in Levis or shorts, but we see that fairly often even at sacrament meetings.

But the bride and groom were well decked out and the service was really quite lovely, lasting over 30 minutes with people telling us that often in Vienna they don't last much longer than about 10 minutes including the time it takes to sign all the official papers.

The official was a woman and she provided a good helping of solid advice to the young couple. The sealing will take place this coming Tuesday at the Frankfurt Temple. There was a lovely wedding reception that evening which we attended for a short while before we had to leave for our usual Friday night activities at the center.

There we had a good showing of our local elders although rumor has it that the mission president feels they may not be making good use of their time and should make sure that missionary purposes are being met. More of that will be discussed in our upcoming Zone Training Meeting this Tuesday and Elder Parker may actually get an assignment to go into all of that in more detail. There is a somewhat old guideline we're aware of where a previous mission president spelled it out in pretty good detail and which we've offered to read. But all of that aside, we did have a very interesting turn-out for what is essentially our only truly social evening of the week at the center.

We had been warned that our current BYU students would not be present because of other commitments and so planned on reduced volumes of food but we did have an interesting attendance from our YSA's. We have a fairly frequent and regular attending young man from Hungary who's getting better and better at his English with his German coming along slowly. Then of late we've been seeing more of a young man from Pakistan who was baptized last January. His mother tongue is Urdu and he definitely is making better strides in English than in German but he's remained quite active and is now responding to our requests that he come around more often to the center at which he at one time was quite a regular.

A newcomer is a young lady from Chile whose brother lives south of Vienna in Wiener Neustadt but who is getting ready to prepare for admission to the University and so needs to live in the city proper. Her brother, a returned missionary, speaks excellent English and pretty good German though they both consider Spanish as their mother tongue. She has been coming to learn German but really has no English foundation which makes it difficult for us to teach her without the significant help of Google translate. (That, by the way, is now much more accessible with everyone using I-Pads!) And then we have our multi-lingual sister from Italy who in addition to Italian can also speak excellent German, English, and previously unknown to us, even Spanish. What a help she has been to our sister from Chile as her brother is not usually around very close.

So one of our favorite games on Friday Night is Spot-It. For those of you who may not be current in the game it consists of fifty or sixty little round cards each of them covered with 8-10 different symbols. Every single one of the cards has some symbol that will match a symbol on the other cards and the idea is to match them up in such a way as to gain cards or get rid of cards in various versions that the game can be played in. Some of the symbols can be things like a zebra, an igloo, a carrot, a tree, a car, a spider, a question mark, an exclamation mark, etc. So we had six of us playing last Friday speaking English, German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Urdu. In order to claim a match you have to call out the name of the item you have paired. So depending on who dealt the cards, we started at the count of three: One, two three; or eins, zwei, drei; or uno, due, tre; or uno, dos, tres; or egy, ket, harom; or wti, 9>, jw (those last three are very poor approximations of the letters making up the three numbers in Urdu!). We were impressed at how good both Chile and Pakistan were at playing this game! One of the symbols we have named Ying Yang and it has the remarkable ability to be an apparently international symbol, at least the name sounded about the same in all five languages. Who could have guessed?

Our final unique event of the week occurred on Tuesday requiring us to hustle a bit on our usual afternoon language courses. Yet another group from BYU was in town for just a couple of days, this time a contemporary dance team. We had been informed that they wanted to put on a flash mob at one of the local plazas and apparently there was a little bit of difficulty in getting permission for the locale of first choice. So they finally decided to do it at a spot on a plaza between the Technical University of Vienna and the Church of Charlemagne. It's also near a major transportation hub where there are usually a lot of people around. However it turned out that with school out and many people off on vacations, the crowds weren't as plentiful as we had hoped. Still it was pretty fun and they actually ended up doing it twice at two different areas on this very big plaza.We tried sending a short one and a half minute video but it's too big to attach to this email. Someone can tell us how to send it later if you're interested.

We had a chance to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir today which is broadcast live at 5:30 PM here in Austria. We got some portions of the Pioneer Day concert that was presented Friday and Saturday nights. Elder Parker was tickled to hear the Handcart Song sung as the opening song. Every time he did a forceps delivery he always asked if the delivering mother knew the forceps song. Most, of course, didn't so he would always sing "For some must push and some must pull." He got a little lump in his throat today!

[Sister Parker] In spite of the over whelming high temperatures, (the street cars are like giant ovens), it has been a great week. It was a joy to be able to see our dear young friend get married on Friday, all in all it was a lovely affair, but I would rather be seeing her get married in the temple on Tuesday. I know that will be most important to her also, she is a very faithful young convert and wanted only to marry a faithful member in the temple. It is a privilege to witness the joy they have found and pray that they will endure to the end.

It still never ceases to amaze me that whenever our close young adults move on, that someone or two moves in to take their place. I always wonder who is going to fill the empty space left by these dear friends, but the Lord knows and sends someone new for us to help support. This is one of the greatest aspects of our calling, except for the good-byes at the end. It's really amazing how the Lord brings people from all over the world together to help each other. Who would have thought that we would have friends from Pakistan, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Chile etc. The Lord really is pulling in his chosen people from the four corners of the earth. And to think Utah has more convert baptisms than we have here. There is work to be done everywhere and everyone can serve wherever they are living. Think Missionary.