From Russia With Love

Dear Family and Loyal Blog Readers,

Unfortunately it took a while to send the pictures on from my camera so this is going to be kind of short, but I hope you enjoy the pictures that I sent and enjoy seeing some of the cool sights of Russia and some pictures of my friends and my companion.

So basically here is what happened this week.  I have a new companion for two weeks because his Visa to Kazakhstan didn't go through.  His name is Elder Lantook and he is from Vladivostok, Russia, which is way cool because now on my mission I have served with a Swede, a German, and a Russian, making me one of the most ethnically diverse missionaries in the field.  I just need to serve with a Ukrainian and an American now and I'll have served with every possible nationality in our mission.

The cool thing is that we moved to the other Lower Area apartment, which is the second biggest in the mission (after the Smolensk apartment which has cathedral ceilings).  What is interesting though, is that our apartment is directly across the street from an extremely low security women's prison.  It's very interesting and we see them do roll call and other such prison related activities every morning.  The bad news is that we have almost no investigators to work with so, we have just been doing a ton of street contacting and visiting inactive members.

So that's about it, I'm running short of time so I'll answer some questions,  First of all I've got a question about if there are any Russian desserts that are like American desserts.  The closest one is these waffle cookies that are pretty much the same as the ones you can find in America.  Otherwise they are pretty different and mostly based on bread and fruit.  Also to answer the question about if Mikhail likes the Book of Mormon: He does, to a degree.  He is an extremely intelligent man so is super-analyzing it.  He has made about six pages of questions for us to handle.  We have our hands full!

Sincerely,
Elder Zachery Brasier