From Russia With Love

Dear Family and Loyal Blog Readers,

Well, it's been an interesting week here in Russia.  Transfers are this week, which means that missionaries are being moved around to different cities and a fresh batch of missionaries come in from the MTC, which means I am no longer the youngest missionary in the field!  It was kind of sad though because Elder Harrison is leaving for Minsk, Belarus and Elder Erikson is leaving for Kaluga, Russia.  Fortunately though I'll be able to see them again most likely.  On the same day we found out that Erikson is leaving we found out that Anatoly, one of our really good friends in the branch is leaving next month for his mandatory year of army service, so we are really going to miss him a lot.  Hopefully though he'll be sent somewhere with missionaries so that he can continue to learn about the gospel. 

Tuesday this week was on of those days that was just ridiculous.  In the morning one of our investigators  Зух (pronounced Zookh, but the  transliteration looks really stupid so I'll just go with the Russian) called us to see if we could visit him in the hospital , so of course we said yes.  However, we had the most difficult time finding the hospital, and actually ended up in an old train museum that we had never seen before.  It was quite strange.  The day got more weird when we met with out investigator and found out why he was in the hospital.  Evidently he was walking along, late at night, in a dark park (a triple combination of things never to do in Russia) and got stabbed.  Don't worry though he's going to be alright because I guess his abs were rock solid from karate training, so the knife didn't go that far in.  He'll be out of the hospital on Friday.  As we were walking outside the hospital with him, we heard a lady screaming that she wanted to die.  We looked over at her as she was screaming and sitting in front of a bar and then she just collapsed and lay unconscious.  Me and Dannenberg thought her wish had come true.  So we called the paramedics and they revived her which we thought was pretty good.....Until the lady started yelling at us for calling  the paramedics.  I guess she was really angry about that.  Sometimes in Russia everything is ridiculous.

Otherwise, it was a somewhat uneventful week.  One of our investigators Mikhail (the former Seven Day Adventist) is reading the Book of Mormon and seems really interested in our church, so we are hoping that he eventually wants to be baptized.  He really is a great guy, and I love meeting with him, even though sometimes I have a hard time understanding him because he uses way big words.

This week, I have officially decided to coin the term "The Curse of Russian Desserts".  I'm going to explain this briefly, because I haven't really talked about Russian food on this blog.  Russian Desserts always look excessively delicious but never are.  Russian's just aren't big on sweet desserts so they tend to be pretty bland but always look way delicious.  It's really quite unfortunate.  But the Russian's make up for it with really good meat and fruit juice.  Mmmmm....Russian fruit juice.  It's probably the best fruit based drink ever.  Maybe next blog post I'll discuss some more Russian food, if the week is overall uneventful.

Anyways that's about it.  If you have any questions, post a comment on the blog post and my mother will forward it too me.  I would love to answer any questions to help people better understand Russia and Russian culture.

 Remain excellent as always,

 Elder Zachery Brasier

P.S.- Congratulations to Riley Creer and Bryce LeFevre on their mission calls!!!  They will both do awesome in their respective fields of service!!!!