November 10, 2014

The sisters in our district had a baptism this week and they didn't plan for it at all, so I got a call the evening before asking if I could do a musical number.  I had nothing prepared, so I and another elder here who plays the violin got together and we improvised a 3-hymn medley from the hymnbook, complete with an improvised key change.  It was quite the effort and in the middle of it the hymnbook decided it didn't want to be on the page I was on, so it just fumbled about till it got where it wanted to be, and I had to constantly remind it that no, I had no intention of  changing songs in the middle of one and that the page I was on was plenty good and that we should stay over there.  It ended up going really well though, mostly thanks to Elder Christiansen's violin playing.  Also, we have a series of concerts coming up in this transfer, and it turns out that the only pianist in all of Bucuresti is yours truly, so I'm going to be able to play for ALL of them.  Should be fun.
We also got to go inside Casa Poporului today (finally) and it is truly impressive.  It's incredibly huge, way huger than you'd think.  It's kind of a deceiving building in that it doesn't look as big as it is, but man is it something.  We didn't take pictures inside: a senior couple did that, so we'll probably have those ready by next week.  I also think there's a facebook page they might put them on.  It's called friends and family of the romania moldova mission or something along those lines.  The senior couples take care of that.  Anyway, most of the pictures this week are from Casa Poporului, some are in the elevator and the ones in the bathroom are there because you have to take a selfie in the bathroom at Casa Poporului.  In fact, Casa Poporului is a really interesting building because it was built under Ceaucescu, so naturally everyone kind of sees it as a symbol of communism and therefore have a kind of negative outlook on it.  However, they put in a ton of work into it and it's kind of a national pride thing because most of the materials are from Romania and all the carving and decoration was made all over Romania.  Therefore, they have this really strange love/hate relationship with it.  That's why they don't really care too much about it.  As in you can see tape residue on the floor from where they used to have carpet, there are a couple missing window panes here and there, there's a huge crack that runs the length of a room due to an over-expansion on one of the expansion joints that they haven't fixed yet, stuff like that.  And that's why I could do a backflip in the biggest room in Casa Poporului and no one batted an eye.
Also, our recent convert just got the Aaronic Priesthood this past week, but we weren't able to see it because he was with all the young adults in a city called Busteni up in the mountains on some kind of excursion.  We're excited for him though.  Also, this is our last week with him because he moves to England on Saturday.  I'm so sad to see him go, but I know we'll keep in touch, so that's at least comforting.
My companion was sick this week, so I got an entire day to listen to jazzy piano and clean our apartment.  Now, it's really really really clean.
Our English classes start up this week and we've been getting a lot of phone calls from our contacting, so we're hoping it'll be a good turnout.

Cu Drag,

Harri (as they call me here)

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