We’re finally back in the good ole’ US of A:)  We missed it and all of you!

We had the BEST time in Lausanne, and it was an incredible experience for both of us.  We will dearly miss our new friends and church family there, but we know that our citizenship is in heaven and that whether or not we meet again on earth (which i hope and pray that we will) we will all be together again!  We want to thank all of you who supported us whether it be through giving money, prayers or support.  We definitely felt the prayers and the love! I will be uploading the remainder of the pictures we have to facebook and possibly do one more post of just pictures on here!  Please, please, PLEASE feel free to comment on here b/c we would love to hear from you!

Thank you all so much, and we love you!

Madison and Holly

So I know some of you get antsy after no blog update for awhile, so I apologize, and I hope this will suffice:)

We are almost done! So insane.  It has simultaneously flown and crawled by.  Does that make sense?  We are in utter shock that we will be leaving this beautiful country on Monday!

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

Here are some photos of us with our precious readers!

Holly and Manuela

Kamalia and I

Holly and Micheline

Me and Christine!

And 2 weeks ago we had our picnic party!  These are some really delayed pictures! Sorry!

Me, Kathleen and Manuela!

Holly, Kathleen and Manuela:)

Lovely ladies:)

Good party but man are we tired:)

Then came our Fiesta Party last week.  It was a big hit:)  We made taco soup, mexican rice, salsa, and guacamole!  The Swiss people loved it! Several of them wanted our recipes:)

Some of the Fiesta decor

We mad a Pinata! unfortunately he met a grisly end;)

Some of the lovely readers and church ladies!

Kathleen and Sasha, one of the Pepperdine students!

yay party!!

Overall, it was a big success!

We stayed in Lausanne this weekend and were invited over to 2 of our readers houses! Our friends Nathalie and Lionel had us over first and it was sooo good!  They cooked us dinner and got us all these different kinds of cheeses! It was spectacular!

Then we went to Holly’s student Micheline’s house on Saturday evening for an English speaking dinner party.  We met some of her colleagues and it was great!

We’ll update again soon!

Back to the USA in T-3 days!

We had a WONDERFUL weekend in Paris!!  But first, let me tell you a little bit about the party and reading sessions we had last week.

It was a VERY busy week for us.  We each had a day where we had 6 readers!!!  It was great but very emotionally exhausting.  Good thing we have each other!  Our reading sessions are going really well.  We are building deep, lasting relationships with some of our readers and having great conversations.  Several of them have already told us how sad they will be when we have to leave:(  It makes us sad too.  Our party was on Wednesday again this past week, and we had a Picnic party!  We told everyone to bring their own sandwich and we would provide the rest.  We all ate outside in the yard and played get to know you games, a water-balloon game, and fellowshipped. We had a pretty decent turn out.  I believe we had 8 students total there and they all had a great time!  We are looking forward to our Mexican fiesta this Thursday!

Ok…now for our Paris extravaganza!

Well, on Thursday night our friends from OC (Shawn, Lane and Amy) were coming from their study abroad home in Vienna to stay with us and then we were all heading off to Paris the next morning.  They arrived here in Lausanne at around 10:15, but we didn’t know which platform their train was coming into!  So we were waiting and waiting and finally H0lly and I decided to go find them.  We searched the hallways and platforms and didn’t see them, so we figured we’d just wait in the lobby.  As we were coming up the ramp to the lobby, we saw Amy and Lane standing there with their big back packs on and we ran to greet them with big hugs.  They hugged us and told us that Shawn had gone the other way to look for us, so we headed off together to track him down.  We finally found him and attacked him with hugs too.  We got to catch up on each others lives during the 30 minute walk back to our home from the train station.  I don’t think we let go of each other the whole way:)

Once we arrived back to our apartment, we had dessert waiting and all stayed up late talking and eating and having a great time!  We figured out that we needed to get up around 5 a.m to get ready and start walking to the station if we were going to get on the right train to Paris.  So we said our goodnights and headed off to bed.

Morning came REALLY early for all of us.  The boys came upstairs and ate a yummy breakfast with us and then we had to get on the road!  We had a minor fiasco with reservations for the train, but if you play the “dumb American” card it works every time:)

We were indeed able to get to Paris (despite what the railroad officials had told us) and we arrived in the City of Lights at around 11:45.  We came out right under the Arc de Triomphe, and it was SO cool to see our first few minutes in Paris!

Our first sight of Paris!

From there we headed down the Champs d’Elysees and had lunch at a little outdoor cafe.  It was SO yummy!

After lunch we headed downtown towards The Louvre and the Musee D’Orsay.  We decided to tackle The Louvre first.

On the way to the Louvre!

Awkward Prom Pic in front of The Louvre:)

It's so huge!!

"The Three Travelers" about to conquer The Louvre! well...part of it:)

After spending 2 1/2 hours in the Louvre, we headed out to find the Eiffel Tower!

So. Awesome.

We were tired babies!

but not too tired to take a jumping pic!

After lounging in front of the Eiffel Tower for awhile, we split up to head to our respective sleeping places.

Remember the group that was here from Harding?  Well they were in Paris at the same time, and we got to stay with them at Sarah’s house!! It was so great to see them all again!!!  Unfortunately we missed a few trains so our time with them was limited:( But we just got a really sweet postcard from them…we love you guys:)

So we got up REAL early the next morning and headed back into town to meet The Three Travelers. We finally found them and headed back out to scale The Eiffel Tower!

Lane and Holly were the only ones who thought this was funny;)

The girls on the Second Tier!! We made it!

We love each other! Yeah Eiffel Tower!!!

Best traveling shoes EVER.

After the Eiffel Tower climb, we ate lunch, got crepes, shopped and headed to the Musee D’Orsay!  Unfortunately we had to RUN through it so Holly and I could catch our train:( but I vowed that I would be back!  Here are some of my favorite paintings we saw.

Solitude by Thomas Alexander Harrison

The White Water Lilies by Claude Monet

Danseuses Bleues by Edgar Degas

Petite Danseuse de quatorze ans by Edgar Degas (Little Dancer of 14 years)

Those were just some of our favorites and it was all in one wing! We WILL be returning:)

Well, I hope you guys enjoyed this blog!  We had a blast and can’t wait to return!

Love you all!

Madison

Well, it’s been a little while since we’ve done an update.  Sorry about that:)  Since you heard from us last, we had a BEAUTIFUL weekend in Cinque Terre, Italy aka. The Five Lands.

The only way to accurately tell you about it is to show you pictures.

Observe…:)

We were excited to FINALLY be in Italy after an 8 hour train ride:)

Mediterranean Pizza in Levanto, Italy.

and Four Cheese pizza too!

The view of Monterosso (the first of five towns) from the train station!

Mary-Kate and Ashley about to embark on a great adventure:)

The water was so clear!!

Vernazza! The second town!

Ready for action:)

Best meal of the trip.

Hands Down:)

The view in Levanto while we were writing in our journals. God is so great.

As you can see, we had a pretty fabulous weekend!

Now to tell you about this week.  We have a pretty full schedule!  Such a blessing, but it can be sooooooo exhausting.  It’s really cool because we’re learning to rely on God for literally everything.  It’s a lesson that I should have learned a long time ago.  But hey, better late than never:)

Let me tell you a little bit about what we do with our readers.  We have them schedule a 45 minute time slot for Monday-Thursday anywhere from about 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.  So they come to the house (we live on the 3rd floor and we meet in the basement) and then we use our Luke workbooks to read selected stories and talk about word definitions, context clues, comprehension and of course we try to get to some spiritual topics as well.  It’s a pretty good combination of everything!

So that’s a little bit of what we do during the week.

Tonight we are having our 2nd party and it is Picnic themed!  We are having everyone bring their own own sandwiches and we are providing sides, drinks and dessert.  Oh and don’t forget the entertainment:)  We are going to have a balloon toss and a word game!  We are excited for the turn out!  Please pray that lots of readers come and have a great time!

Thanks for all the encouragement and please keep it coming!

Before I go, a quick prayer request! Our friends from OC (Shawn, Lane and Amy) are traveling to Lausanne on Thursday to stay with us and then we are all heading to Paris to meet up with our friends from Harding and to see the city!!  Please pray for all of us to travel safely and have a great time!

Love you all!

Holly and I have been SO busy this past week that there has been ZERO time to blog!  We got to go to Bern and Interlaken on free travel last weekend and it was great!  The mountains will never stop being beautiful.

Sunday came quickly and we were getting excited to meet a campaign group from Harding University that was coming through to stay with us for a week!  We went to church in Geneva, and after church met the whole group.  They are so much fun!  It was so great for Holly and I to have some American kids our ages to spend time with.  We forgot how much we missed it!

The family that lead the Harding campaigners were some of the sweetest most wonderful people I’ve ever met.  Their names are Robert and Sylva McCready.  They stayed in our apartment with us, and were so much fun to have as guests!  Robert was always singing in the other room, and Sylva would come in and volunteer to help Holly and I with whatever needed to be done.  Their campaign’s “official” mission was to encourage the people of Lausanne, and they did this by distributing, singing at old folks homes, interacting with the teens and getting to know the people of the town. As far as we are concerned, God sent them here to encourage us.  They were so helpful during the stressful week!  We were busy planning our first party and scheduling readers, and they volunteered to do whatever was needed to help.

We spent time getting to know each other during some delicious meals cooked by our host mom Stephanie, and before you knew it, we were inseparable:) We got to help with their campaign during our free time, and in return, they helped us throw the most amazing first Let’s Start Talking party possible!

Let me introduce you to the Texas/Oklahoma Hoe-Down!

Hangin out Texas style:)

Laura and the McCready kids helped get things started!

Robert led the game called "Yee-Haw!"

We had 8 readers come and several members of the church as well!

Holly and her reader Manuela!

Me and Laura! Love her!:)

Trey was the only other Texan there and he helped me lead line dancing! We had a blast!

Taylor did such a great job of cutting the tomatoes;)

Our first party was a success!!! Yee-Haw!:)

We had so much fun and so did our readers!  It would not have been nearly as wonderful without the help and love of our wonderful new friends from Harding!

Laura, Taylor, John, Trey, Sarah, Tessa, Robert, Sylva, Rebekah, Rachel and Alexander:
Thanks so much for all of the help and encouragement you gave to us.  We love you and are praying for you.  See you in Paris!!!:)

Keep them in your prayers as they continue to spread God’s love throughout Europe these next few weeks.  We are really getting to know our readers now and we each have about 12! Praise God! We are being continually blessed and reminded that God is in control and he is guiding our steps.  Please pray that we continue to get through to our readers and that we stay safe! We are on our way to Cinque Terre, Italy in the morning! More updates soon!

Arrivederci!

It’s been awhile since i’ve updated!  We have been so busy!:)

Today is our last day of the week that we have reading sessions.  I have would usually have 5 readers today, but a few had to cancel so now I only have 2, but that’s alright!  Holly has 3 today and hopefully they will all show up!

So at the end of my last post, I mentioned that Holly and I were going to try Kebabs.  And we did!  Let me just tell you the story, and because a picture is worth a thousand words, i’ll let them do the talking:)

So excited to eat the Kebabs!!!

the first several bites were GREAT. but then it got weirdly spicy and kind of gross.  We had to cheer each other on in order to finish them.  And did I mention that they were MINI kebabs? yeah…this was our conclusion.
And that is the story of our first and last Kebabs.

Yesterday we decided to invite our readers to meet us at a place down the street called Kony Bubble Tea.  Each week we do a party or get together with the readers to help them practice their conversational English in a relaxed setting, but this week we weren’t able to do a themed party, so we settled for this!  Despite sending them all an email, only 2 showed up to have tea with us.  But we were so glad they did!  We had a great time!

Holly had a peach one...

And I had strawberry...YUM!

Nathalie and Lionel came with us!

We had a blast getting to know each other!  We talked about movies and traveling and food…everything!  Unfortunately, shops like this one close around 7 p.m. here, so Nathalie and Lionel invited us to dinner with them!  It was great!  Holly and I split Cashew Chicken and a pot of Jasmine tea.  It was sooooooo good.  We spent the evening learning about Switzerland and some fun places we needed to go before we leave!

We walk everywhere here, so from the restaurant it was about a 15 minute walk to the house.  It was pouring down rain last night so it was a good thing that we both brought our rain jackets!!  We still got soaked, but it was worth it:)

We were very cold and wet but it was so worth it!

Our first reader will be here around 2:30 today, so we’re getting a little bit of a late start.  This weekend we plan on going to the lake with some readers if the weather permits, and taking a day trip somewhere fun! (thanks for the ideas Grandmom)  I posted some pictures on facebook of the GIANT hill we have to climb to the grocery store every week, but the pictures just didn’t do it justice.

So…I’ll leave you with this…:)

Hill of Death Video

(I’m sorry if you can’t see it, i’m trying to figure out how to post it somewhere else!!)

Bye!

This verse is one that I got on my daily verse email that really applied to what Holly and I are trying to do here.  We used it in our first team devotional:)

Sunday morning came early yesterday and lasted for a long time!  We got up and met the missionaries downstairs at 9 to make the 40 minute journey to Geneva for church. We arrived in time to meet some of the wonderful church members who welcomed us so warmly!  We listed to the speaker on headphones that had someone translating for us.  It was a great lesson!  After church, we had a luncheon and got to fellowship some more.  The food was delicious and the company was great!  Our favorite was the variety of desserts:)  After lunch, we got to sit in on the choir practice and hear them sing some well known church songs in French.  They even sang the song Down to the River in English!  It was so funny to think that it was a foreign language text for them.  Once practice was over, we headed home to make it in time for night church.  Holly and I thought that it started at 5:30 but it was actually at 5…we almost missed it!! Luckily that was not the case and we made it in time to hear the lesson and take communion and meet the believers afterwards.  Everyone has been so sweet to us, even when we can’t understand!

We ate a delicious dinner Sunday night with the family outside in their backyard.  The weather has been really beautiful lately and the mountains get clearer every day!

Today we had our very first readers!!!  It is a holiday here so some of our readers rescheduled for later in the week or next week, but overall, we would both say that today was a success.

Hey guys! It’s me Holly and I’m going to tell you about my readers. My first reader was a woman named Manuela that had read with an LST rep before, but hadn’t done it in a few years. For the first 20 minutes we got to know each other by showing pictures of our families and sharing our interests. She is so sweet and can read English very well! We actually got through 3 lessons It was awesome to hear her read and comprehend what each paragraph was saying. I was able to ask her open-ended questions and she gave a lot of feed back. I loved meeting her and can’t wait until next week when I see her again!

My next reader was a girl named Tiffany. She did not speak English very well, but was very fun and seemed energetic about learning the English language. She is a younger girl and is still in school. She is actually about to take final exams so a few prayers for her wouldn’t hurt. Her mom also came and read with Madison and after both reading sessions were over, all four of us got to talk and both women said they wanted to take us to Lac Leman sometime HOW FUN!

For me, today was very encouraging and I’m really looking forward to meeting the rest of my readers and I’m excited to see how much each reader improves while I am here. Over the next three days I have seven more readers and would love prayers for an open heart, mind, and spirit as we read the book of Luke. It’s so comforting to know that we have so many brothers and sisters in Christ praying for us at home. Thanks so much for all of the support! I love you all and I’ll talk to you later

Hello! Me again:)  Like Holly said, I met with a woman named Christine today and she was precious!  She was very receptive and can’t wait to show me pictures of her friends and family tomorrow when she comes back!  On Wednesday, we are trying to get all of our readers to meet a bubble tea place on the corner to meet each other and practice conversational English together!!  I hope that everyone gets to come and fellowship together!

Tomorrow we are going to try Kebabs for the first time and we are so excited!  I hope everyone has a wonderful day tomorrow and we’ll be back soon!  Love you all!

Madison

This blog post is going to be very long…so bear with me:)

Well, yesterday started our first free weekend while we’re here!

We planned on going on a day trip to another town, but since we had yet to discover all of our home away from home, we thought we’d try that first.

When we got here, Brady had given us a map marked with places that he thought we needed to see and told us to find them and take pictures there.   We tried to do that several times but kept getting lost!  So after being lovingly made fun of by Brady and Stephanie, we figured out what was wrong.  We hadn’t seen that Brady marked where our house was on this map, so we had never really had a starting point!  We were doing it backwards!  So once we had the map turned the right way, we found everything so easily!  It was a miracle! Here’s some of the “must see” places in Lausanne:)

We ate a picnic lunch outside of one of the museums...those birds had their beady little eyes on our sandwiches.

Despite the birds, we had a great time:)

The beautiful cathedral of Lausanne was right up the hill from where we had lunch!

We saw this reflection from the stained glass and we had to rep Gamma Rho:)

We like to try to get into things we aren't supposed to...

Then we went shopping downtown!  and guess what we found…?

what are the odds?!

and of course, a yummy snack!

We got to come back home, relax and layout to get some sun on our balcony.  All the while playing some good old country music to remind us of home:)

That night, a group of students from Pepperdine’s satellite campus came over and had a delicious home cooked meal with us.  It was so much fun to be with some Americans that were our age!  We played some games, ate some delicious food and had an all around great time:)  They are just about a 10 minute walk away, so we hope we will see them again soon! Maybe even on a free travel weekend!

Speaking of free travel, today we decided to take on the train station and head out to the city of Gruyéres! It had been described to us as the typical Switzerland town so, of course, we had to see it!

It's the cheese capitol of Switzerland!

our delicious lunch we made ourselves!

beautiful flowers were EVERYWHERE!

All of the cows have bells around their necks and you can hear them from a mile away!

This is for you moms...he was my favorite:)

The town of Gruyéres! Isn't it great?

The beautiful view we got coming around the bend:) Isn't God amazing?

After we experienced the incredible views that Gruyéres had to offer, we hopped on a bus and headed out to the town of Broc where the Nestlé/Cailler chocolate factory stands.  It was just re-done in April of this year, so we were some of the lucky people who got to see it fresh after the re-model!! We took a tour (which was much like willy wonka’s chocolate factor…they even had an elevator), saw how chocolate was made, and got to try some free chocolate!  We thought we would get to take a little already wrapped piece of chocolate with us at the end, but little did we know, that heaven was waiting around the corner at the end of the tour…BEHOLD…

this is what I like to call holly's "eye on the prize" face...:)

We absolutely stuffed ourselves with chocolate, and we bought some to bring back to the states with us too.  Overall, today was a wonderful day!  We got to experience Switzerland, run to catch a train, eat yummy Swiss chocolate, see God’s brilliant creation and have a fun night together full of pizza, LST prep and a movie:)

Tomorrow, we are going to the Geneva church and we can’t wait! We will have a luncheon with them and then rush back here to have night church with the small congregation at 5.  We can’t wait to meet everyone, and FINALLY start our reading sessions on Monday!!

Sorry this post is so long!  I’ll try to avoid this by updating more often!  Please keep us in your prayers!  Also, I love you Grandmom and i’ll shoot you an email soon:)

Bon Nuit!

Madison

PS.  Funny story…When Holly and I were on the way to the grocery store yesterday, we heard someone playing the piccolo outside.  We thought it was so neat!  Well, on our way back it was still playing, and as we were walking in the door, I thought I recognized the tune but I thought that there was no way it could be what I thought it was.  We got upstairs and were unloading groceries when it started again, and this time there was no mistaking it.  The Harry Potter theme song came floating through the window…it was glorious!  I ran to our bedroom window, threw it open, and stood there listening.  It thoroughly made my day…and gave Holly a good laugh.:)

PPS. The title just happens to be a song we have in our heads every time we travel somewhere new…:)