November 4, 2013

This week was great. Our English classes are a smash success. We had about 50 people show up to the first class and probably around 30 came back on Saturday! We completely filled the entire church, there wasn't a chair unused. Were crossing our fingers over here, hoping they stay going well and we might even get some investigators out of it. One of them even came to church on Sunday! We were able to give him a Book of Mormon and he said he would study it at home. We are really trying to get more people to come into the church more often, and that was why we have weekly branch activities on Friday nights. The only problem is no one shows up. Were going to try to make them more enjoyable and well defined so that people will want to come and then they can meet members and grow an affinity for the Church. Our original plan was to have a munch and mingle at the end of our English classes, but so many people showed up that we cant possibly do that. So we are trying to think of more ways to get them to stay and talk afterward. Dad suggested a while ago that we do a culture-like type deal for English classes and activities, which I totally loved, but my companion at the time wasnt a huge fan of (probably because hes not american). But my new companion is all for it, so were going to try it! Were really trying to make our English classes and weekly branch activities as enjoyable as possible for these students and investigators. Speaking of which, the awesome couple that came to our Halloween activity invited us over to their house and she even showed me pictures of it and her son. Her son is absolutely incredible. He is only 25 and hes a professor for engineering at the university here and he works for a firm in america at the same time. We are really really really hoping that we are able to make it over there, since they only invited us over tentatively, and didnt set up an exact date. During our spiritual thought during our first English class, we started with a prayer, obviously, and then when I finished praying, one of our students came up and gave us an orthodox prayer book. At first we thought he wanted us to pray from it, but then we realized he was just being nice.
In other news, we had another lesson with Valeriu this week, and it went alright. He seems to believe everything that we believe, only he has a hard time understanding that we actually are talking about the same thing. He has been reading in the Book of Mormon though, so I can see some progress coming from him.

November 3, 2013

Well, this week was cool. We had a Halloween party for our branch and two of our English students and one of our investigators showed up! It was great. The English students that came are a married couple and they have a son who lived in America for a bit with an LDS family and he was able to speak some Romanian with a returned missionary who went to Romania. Also, the husband went to England in 1975 and he visited the temple there! He said it was a very powerful place. They are a great family and they even gave us a little ceramic pumpkin and invited us over! They aren't too interested in the Church right now, but that's okay. It was awesome to have them come to that activity. Also, this week was Craiova Week or something like that and there was stuff going on everywhere. Pretty cool. There were a lot of stands with hand made stuff like vases and plates and other cool stuff. We have English classes coming up this week, and we've been getting a lot of phone calls and talking to a lot of people so I hope they'll be really good this transfer.

We saw this guy in the park who made a little chair for his dog on his bike, and his dog loved it up there!  It was crazy!  Sorry, the picture kinda sucks, but it's the best i could get since he was far away and it was dark.  Also, there was a mime in Centru who wouldn't do anything unless you paid him, which was pretty funny.  Anyway, have a good week and I hope you don't get sick again!