February 23, 2015

So I got a haircut this week and it's the greatest haircut I've ever received.  It was so great that I thought I needed to tell you guys about it.
Well, the American family is officially moved in and the dad is called as branch president, so there go my days as branch presiding elder.  They are a really cool family and I think it's going to be great with them here.  They've already fed us twice, which is way more than we're used to, and we played settlers of catan with them and their kids, so we're doing well.
Our English classes are going incredibly well.  We actually just got invited to attend a symphonic orchestra tomorrow with a couple of them, which we're really excited about.  We're doing this pretty cool thing for our spiritual thoughts actually.  An elder in the district came up with the idea of telling stories from the book of mormon and showing what we can learn from them.  They make for some really entertaining spiritual thoughts, especially when we reenact the stripling warriors fending off the lamanite army because they did not doubt the truth of what their mothers taught them.  I doubt anyone has tried to incorporate belly stabbing or throat slitting into a spiritual thought before, but we managed to get it in and keep it spiritual at the same time.  We're excited for the weather to be warming up and we can start going out to the parks and stuff, so that'll be really great.
Sorry I haven't sent pictures in over a month, but here are some now.

February 16, 2015

Well, this past week we had some good english classes.  Since saturday was valentine's day, we taught our class how to ask someone on a date.  They all seemed to like that, especially when we did some examples for them of good and bad ways to do it.  We taught them how to start a conversation on the phone and they seem to love learning that the correct response to what's up? is always nothing.  So about the new family that moved in, they're basically the Weasley family, like from Harry Potter.  They were in Budapest this week, so we still don't really know too much about them, but we'll find out more tomorrow when we go to their house.

February 9, 2015

A new family from America moved into the branch yesterday and they seem really great.  He's the chair of Mormon studies at some California University, and there are apparently only 3 of those in the world, which is interesting.  He's going to be doing something with the university here for 5 months, though exactly what I have no idea.  Anyway, they have 3 little kids and since our branch consists of only grandmas, they were really excited about them moving in.  Oh and he's supposed to be the new branch president once he gets things settled.

We started up English this week and it's going really well.  Our students really like the class and some of them even brought their friends for the second class.  We played do you love your neighbor for the first class and that seemed to really break the ice and get everyone comfortable with us.
Also, we had a special transmission for the 3rd hour of church for celebrating the land of Romania being dedicated for 25 years.  Other than the technological mishaps, it was good.  I had to translate for it for the new American family, which was kind of rough because I couldn't hear and I haven't translated in a while, but I warmed back up to it by the end.
Anyway, have a great week!

February 2, 2015

So this week, probably the most exciting thing was we went to an orphanage to do service, which was basically playing games with the kids and helping them with homework.  Well, I helped them with homework.  Everyone else played games with the kids.  Well, I asked the girl what homework she had, she showed it to me and it was order of operations stuff.  You know, in math.  Like you do division before addition and that kind of stuff.  Well, these problems were HUGE.  Gigantic long strings with parentheses inside parentheses and all kinds of crazy stuff.  At first I was like wow she must be super smart.  Then I find out she doesn't even know how to divide and that she's just been walked through problems a million times and now has no idea.  She was just given wayyyy too difficult of problems.  Anyway, so I couldn't just take that lying down and I had to at least teach her how to divide.  We started out by drawing balls and circling them in groups and then counting the groups.  That seemed to take and then we could work on doing it with just numbers.  However, she was the only one doing homework while all the other kids were playing, so it was a losing battle.  So she got to go play and math would have to wait I guess.