Visiting Coimbatore

We had a wonderful visit to Coimbatore, a city in Tamil Nadu State about 6 hours drive south of Bangalore.

 This is the Church in Coimbatore.  It's a beautiful building in the same scheme as the new Whitefield Road Church being built in Bangalore.

 We got to see some of the Elders serving here as they were in the Church for interviews with President Funk that day.

  Elder Aruldoss, Elder Aeshamalla, Elder Vaddi, Elder Thomas (from my home branch in BLR).

 Here are two of our "Bye, now" boys: Elder Ram & Elder Thanniru. (They like to make fun of Elder Wigg because he always says "bye, now" at the end of telephone conversations!)

 Elder Solomon is from Toronto, Canada (Go, Canada!!) and Elder Smoot from USA.

 Back: Elder D. Hodgson, Elder Augustine (from my Branch in BLR), Elder Smoot, Elder Solomon

Front: Elder Thanniru, Elder Racharla, Elder Challa, Elder Ram.

 Here's a view of the houses in Coimbatore.  It looks like a typical Indian city.

We were looking for an apartment for the Sisters to come to Coimbatore next month.  This was one of the windows on one of the apartments, though not the one we were planning to lease.

 Saturday was Youth Conference.  These are the young men.

 This is a group of the Young Men and Young Women in Coimbatore.

 Here are the 18 year old potential missionaries.  The future looks great!

Elder Wigg gets to pose with the Youth!

At the Church, we ran into an old friend, Elder Neelapu, or 'Smiley' but we're allowed to call him by his first name now.  It was fun to see him.  He was released a couple months ago and has just come back to see some of his converts.  That is so cool!

We had supper out with Elder and Sister Tiefenbach from Regina.  We had Italian food and the pasta was pretty good. I had a salad, which I always enjoy!

Coimbatore Church building

Our room was really nice and comfortable in The Residency.

 The Residency, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India

Gowda is our driver and he is the best driver in India, we always tell him.  He helps keep us safe.  It's a 6 hour drive from Bangalore to Coimbatore.  I get lots of napping done in the back seat plus some photo editing and one day I even watched a movie on my ipod.  Nice and relaxing, isn't it?  

Hey, we even found a couple good potential apartments for the missionaries, so that's good.

The weekend was productive and fun!