Our First Real Day Here

On Thursday morning it was so tempting to use the jet lag excuse to sleep in, but we decided to get a start on our time and went out in the ministry. We arrived barely on time at 9:30, to a group of about 10. We plunked down, still in the US mindset of being put in a group and riding around all morning. We hoped to be gradually introduced to how service was here, and then easing into the territory. As we soon found out, however, that's not quite how it works. The territory is relatively local, and with parking scarce, petrol expensive, and the Brits lack of the American laziness, they usually walk the territory. Not our definition of drive to the territory ("map" as they say) and then get out and walk a few doors or maybe a street; this means walk strait from the hall and into town. So bring good shoes if you ever visit(more on this later). After all these exclamations about walking, i did end up riding with a brother that first day, but rest assured it hasn't happened since. Eric got thrown right into the tradition of hoofing it on the first morning (Such an understatement. -Eric). The other thing that is different about service here is that you only go by twos, not four or six. This is a challenge for us because:

• We don't have many calls yet, so we have to just follow our partner around
• The balance of brothers and sisters is never even (they solve that problem by just going brother-sister, but since they aren't in cars and always public places they have no objection to it) (And its nice to be trusted that we will all be doing Jehovah's work. At times in the states people seem to be almost paranoid in believing that others will do something wrong. Its just very refreshing to see everyone focus on positive things, and have mature thinking. -Eric)
• Awkward silences run rampant, especially when you don't know the person well yet and have exhausted the usual list of introductory questions.

But we survived the first morning without any adverse effects, and logged our first 2 hours. Afterwards was back home for a quick lunch. We were already feeling cell phone("mobile") withdrawal, we we set off to find SIM cards (what they use here, hard to explain, click here if you want it explained) for our mobiles. We received directions from the family, just spoken vague ones. We set out anyway, confident in our ability to navigate the unfamiliar. Within the first few blocks we were obviously already trudging past new landmarks, and eventually consulted a passerby who confirmed our course, but added some details that ended up misleading us. We knew to walk till the train station and turn left at some point ("Turn left at the green"... um... what's a green? -Eric.) and we would be on the desired road. In all the confusion of navigation and narrative, we ended up turning one road to early. Unbeknownst to us, this put us on a parallel course with the road we needed; we were expecting to intersect it. Twenty minutes later we decided we had strayed to far, and traced our steps back. We tried a new route, and stopped to ask a tube(subway) attendant for directions, and 1 hour 15 minutes later arrived on Chiswick High Road. (At the tube station we saw the sister I had worked with in service that morning so that was cool. -Eric) It should have taken no more than 20 min. We got the sim cards but had to wait around as the employees fussed and huddled and consulted about how to get our dumb American phones to work, which we thought would just be plug and play. After that was all sorted(partially anyway, my phone worked), we discovered that since we had come in from a different angle, we now had no idea how get home. We somehow picked a road that "just looked right" and it happened to somehow go right by the Kingdom Hall, which we then knew where. So that little trip ended up running us about 3 hours. Meeting was that night, and we were introduced to many many friends, and promptly forgot all of their names. (After meeting about 50 people, we remembered maybe 2 of them by name. But we have a system now so meeting and remembering their names is a little bit easier. -Eric) We will write more about the congregation in a future post. London started out busy right off the bat, and no doubt will continue to be that way.