"bahhh, I'm sorry but can you smell that?" --Janise

Our accommodations took me back to the good ole’ days in the ever beloved DT U2 at BYU. For those of you not hip with the acronym lingo which my university alma mater seems to be infamous for, please allow me to elucidate. You see, at BYU (Brigham Young University), we seem to be incapable of saying the full title of anything. So much so that I think the disease (aka lazy maybe?? J) seems to trickle down to even our housing, church callings/responsibilities, homework, food, you think I’m kidding but I swear even roommates, kitchens, and modes of transportation and maybe even friends, relationships, and family aren’t able to escape it!! DT: Deseret Towers (the freshman dorms I lived in and loved so well, which have since been demolished) U2: “U” Hall (they were all letters of the alphabet) second floor. Commonly referred to by its admiring residents as the orphanage, jail, prison, projects, etc., this all due to the beige painted cinderblock walls, dim yellow lighting (and not because they were awkward fluorescents), closet shape, windows that only opened like 4 inches (hmmm…maybe if you are so concerned that people will love it sooo much living in these jolly circumstances that they’ll just jump out the window and try to fly you might reconsider the accommodations…just a suggestion), and awesomely comfortable, paint chipped, steel beds that took up the ENTIRE room with their 40 year old stained (I guess you could say “well decorated”) mattresses. Oooh how I miss you!

The only difference between this and the patron housing is that we were in bunk beds (and the mattresses, from what I could tell, were free from decoration)!!! I love bunk beds!!! But I was thinking about that, too. I think it’s only because I’m little, aaannnd it’s really hard to find something that I don’t fit on or in, since I’m on tangent anyway, so I can totally enjoy the blast from the past (although Daddy, you’d have NEVER fit sitting up, on top OR bottom bunk or laying down for that matter. You should submit your design of our bunk beds to the department of church patron housing so your size people can fit too!)

We ended up with some roomies. Two mid-teenage girls from Torino, Italy. They were on a temple trip with their stake’s youth. Pretty cool. We had a good time with our mixed English-Spanish-Italian. I heart meeting people from different parts of the world and from hello we just have this deeply rooted understanding or bond and trust because of a church that was founded on lasting and true principles, restored by the inspiration, divine will, and power of an omniscient God through the humility of a 14 year old boy. Isn’t that just something to think about? It’s truly remarkable. To think that these people—we all come from different corners of the world and to where? A building with little signage, acclaim, or architectural wonder to speak of, and who’s presence draws people, young and old, financially free and scraping to survive, some even spending or selling all they have for a single opportunity, and all without advertisement other than it’s existence. If you’ve never been, I challenge you to look into it. It will change your life.

I’m sorry, I’ll get off my soapbox…but don’t promise to stay down J this is my blog after all.

Before we went to bed we actually hopped back on the train into Bern for a night on the town and some dinner. We found the coolest place. It was like a shopping mall of every type of food you can imagine. Like from every place on earth. From order, eat standing, and gone to hoighty toighty. From bar to wine counter. From smoking to non-smoking. We walked around for probably 15 minutes just to try and explore all the stairwells and little foot bridges and their end points, following fragrance of food from fresh to fried…mmm…I’m salivating just remembering. Turkish was the choice we went with for the evening and it was to die for. It cost more than our room but hey, you only live once, right? Yeah, that’s what I keep telling myself.

We sat “outside” which meant we were sitting in what appeared as a little courtyard that, had there not been a catwalk type walkway and the view of many people and tables from the second floor directly above us, you could have easily lost yourself in the ambiance of sitting among a grand assortment of people, tongues, cultures, and colors at a little café table for two, sipping orange fanta, eating humus, and enjoying the light breeze as it wisps across the starry night sky, with the aroma of…sewer??? Huh? That can’t be right? What the? Ok, this is a cruel joke. I feel like I just got thrown back into my mission. It was common knowledge that there were two types of smells on city streets of Taiwan, where I spent most of my time. The first was the smell of the sewers and the second the glorious smell of tradition—Qiu Do Fu (pronounced Cho-dow-foo; English translation: stinky tofu—No, I’m 100% not kidding). You know, it was one of those things that you’d hope to just “get used to with time” but no. I don’t believe the day will ever come where you could waft either of those scents, no matter where you are, and think nothing of it. Impossible! And the only way to tell them apart, a pearly wisdom handed down from missionary to missionary, was by the feel. “The feel?” you ask. Yes. The feel. You see, Qui Dofu maybe the smell of sponge, plum with absorbed rotten blood, deep fried, and sold in utterly unsanitary environments, with a side of raw cabbage and if you’re luck a couple shreads of carrot, but sewer, sewer is always accompanied by a brief gust of moist heat fluttering up your skirt as your ride your bike across a grate. And as if that wasn’t an awesome enough experience that I so looked forward to on a daily basis, I swear there was just some dirty little asian man down those holes with a fan doing it all on purpose because almost like clockwork this domino effect would be set in motion: smell, moist gust up skirt, skirt goes flying up revealing ALL a girl could want to keep hidden underneath, the frantic attempt to balance looking forward-not get hit by some crazy “asian driver” in a car (I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it and I served there, it’s soooo true, if not worse there) or worse, and more likely, on a scooter-find the end of your skirt without looking down-fight the wind to get that end back down toward your knees-keep pedaling and in a manner that keeps the end of your skirt under the direction of the wind so as to avoid the ever common repeat and threepeat-all the while maintaining whatever dignity you have left as “a representation of the Lord, Jesus Christ”. Yeah, I can’t even joke about missing that…at least the sewer, moisture, smell parts. And all that long description was to give credibility to my ability to identify the soothing fragrance of sewer. And yes, at the end of dinner I was able to trace that reminiscent smell back to a sewer grate just a table’s distance to my right. Yup, “Check please!”