October 27, 2014

Well, our week was pretty interesting.  The life lesson from this week is that the Lord will answer your prayers.  So I told you about the fun run last week.  That happened on Saturday and it was all good to go.  Everything was set up and running smooth.  We just had to pray for no rain.  Approaching the weekend, no rain in sight.  The weather is nice and relatively warm and wonderful.  Friday comes along and the temperature drops to 10 celsius.  That was kind of worrying, so we checked the weather for the next day, hoping that it would just be a little chilly spell or whatever, but no such luck, the next day was supposed to be even colder.  We didn't expect the cold to be a problem with our fun run, so we started preparing plan b.  However, we still had the permission to do the run and we figured there would be some hardcores that would show up as well.  Saturday, as we closed in on the event, just hours away, the sky darkens and we start to see glistening in the air.  At first, I thought I was just dehydrated, but then it got denser to the point that we could clearly tell what it was. Snow.  It snowed all day.  We ended up getting about 3 inches of snow.  So that's the life lesson.  Our prayers for no rain were answered.  No one ended up showing up to our event except us and the police, but that didn't stop us from still running around the lake in the snow.  We had to salvage our event somehow.  We then had another activity in the chapel later that night with all the side activities we were planning on having at the fun run.  It ended up working out well in the end, despite the wintry intervention.
Alex, our recent convert is still doing great.  Oh yeah and on Sunday, the district president was at church, and afterward he ran outside yelling: "snowball fight!" so the other recent convert of one week runs outside and tackled him into the snow and rubbed his face in it.
Here's some pictures, but I have more that I took on my film camera which I'll be able to show you later:

October 20, 2014

Well, this week was pretty great.  We were super busy all week just gettin it done and then we topped it off with a double baptism on saturday.  Our investigator got baptized and then one of the other elders investigators that had been investigating forever finally decided this week he needed to be baptized so he did and they had a double ceremony.  It was great and I got to give a talk in the ceremony, as well as play the piano for the opening and closing hymns, and accompany a violin solo, and do one of the baptisms.  It was quite the day.  But it was great.  I slept really well that night.  We're also working right now on a "fun run" in the park for halloween where people run about a 5k and zombies chase them.  We're stoked about it and we hope that everybody likes it and shows up.

Hope you guys have a great week!

Here's the pictures:

October 13, 2014

Alright, well our investigator, Alex, is still doing great and we're excited for him to be baptized this weekend!  Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooot!  He asked us to go suit shopping with him on Thursday because he thinks he should have one as a member, which is awesome.  He also said he wanted to get pants like the ones that I was wearing at the time, so +1 for style points for me haha.  Speaking of my pants, I think they caused a guy to hate us.  I'll tell you the story.

We got a weird call from an American guy who wanted to help us with our English classes, so we told him we weren't paid and all that business, thinking that's what he wanted.  He said he was a volunteer and that he really just wanted to learn Romanian.  We offered to teach him Romanian and set up to meet on Friday.  Friday rolls around and he shows up at the church.  First thing he says is "Oh so you're Mormon boys?"  We replied to the affirmative and then proceeded to try to get to know the dude by asking him those small talk questions.  Turns out he has the same last name as my companion.  Eventually, he said he can't imagine himself "embracing our church other than in a historical standpoint" and tried really hard to get out of there.  We told him it was fine and that we could still teach him Romanian if we wanted, but he made some more lame excuses and left.  Later that night, we get a text message from him that says something to the effect of: you deceived me by not telling me you were mormons and you both seemed to be homosexuals I pray for your homosexuality and I hope you repent of your homosexuality. ~gregory lake.  That was definitely one of the most bizarre texts that I have ever received in my life.

In other news, we are planning a zombie fun run in two weeks in the park for Halloween and we're really excited for it.  We'll have people sign up to be zombies or humans and the zombies will lie in wait for the humans to run by and they'll make an attempt to catch them.  Should be fun and we're hoping to find some new people this way.  "We need to stock up on investigators for winter" says an elder in my district.  We're really looking forward to it and hope we get a good turnout.  A funny thing I learned today was that to say even and uneven numbers in Romanian, you can just say par or impar, but you can also say cu sot or fara sot, meaning with or without husband.  Never thought of numbers being couples, but I guess it kind of makes sense, since 2 is a couple anyway.  Alright, well, you guys have a great week!

October 6, 2014

Our investigator is doing awesome and he's still progressing toward baptism.  Only problem is that he told us that now that he chose to be baptized, all these blessings have been coming into his life, including the opportunity to move to England.  So now he's going to be moving about a month after he gets baptized, which is too bad because we need more strong members here!  But other than that he's doing great and we're really excited for him!

In other news, we went to this amazing part of town today called Dragonul Rosu (The Red Dragon). It's this incredibly huge market where they sell stuff made in china.  It turns out this is where most of the shops in all of Bucuresti get their stuff to sell.  It's kind of like one of those sell to sellers type deals.  Bust this is gigantic.  It's a complex of 10 buildings (Dragon 1, 2, and so forth) each bigger than any walmart.  However, most of these places sell all the same stuff, but you can find some really amazing stuff there.  We found this chinese grocery store type deal where you could get chinese ramen, chopsticks, chinese candy, crazy weird soy sauces, just a ton of really cool chinese stuff.  It was a really cool place and I took pictures, I just forgot to bring my card reader, so next time you'll get some pictures.

Also, I started making Romanian ciorba (soup) since winter's coming and I gotta prepare.  There's a member in my old area who cooks really well so I called him up and he taught me how to make it over the phone.  Surprisingly enough, it ended up amazing.  I've decided that I need to learn how to make Romanian food because it's great and I'm going to miss it.  So I'll learn more in the coming weeks.  At the chinese place, I found some of those special soup spoons that they have that like hook onto the bowl so it doesn't fall in, so I had to get one of those.  Now I'm all set with my soupiness for the coming cold.

Anyway, hope you guys all have a great week!