This has officially been a really long week. Sometimes in the mission field a time warp opens up and stretches the days out to be weeks and you end up on your next P-Day feeling extremely exhausted. Other times, the time warp makes the days seem like only a few hours and you end up wondering where your week went! Those darn mission time warps, they just really mess up your week.
Thursday night I left for my first Visa trip of my mission. We had to ride on a night train to Moscow, which was.. interesting. I must say I am not a huge fan of night trains since the people who ride them are usually quite drunk so you always get into a cabin with two drunk Russian men who smell like beer. So yep, that was fun. On Friday morning I arrived in Moscow and got to see my old MTC companion Elder Stegeby and my good friend Elder Mitchell. I was really happy to see them both again and we got to spend a lot of time catching up on what has been happening over the last three months. In Moscow our plane got delayed quite a bit and even got delayed on the tarmac, which would have been quite annoying except that I got mysteriously upgraded to first class! I have no clue how but when we printed my ticket it was for a first class seat so I got to fly like a big-shot to Kiev. I think the meal on the airplane was one of the better meals I have eating on my mission! (of course I jest, but it was pretty good). However, when we arrived in Kiev we found out that because of the delay we had missed our flight back to Moscow and had to book another one. This meant that we had to wait and extra five hours in the Kiev airport, which is pretty much a warehouse with one restaurant in it. It's a good thing I like Elder Stegeby and Elder Mitchell a lot because I would have got quite bored. Eventually I made it back to Moscow and took another night train back to Nizhny. I was absolutely exhausted when I returned, and the whole time just felt like one incredibly long day.
On Saturday we had our branch Halloween party which was awesome. We spent all day preparing decorations, calling people, and pretty working hard for the party that night. I was put in charge of making fake gravestones and other decorations so I happily started making gravestones for a multitude of people: Michael Jackson, Mufasa, Steve Jobs, Ian Curtis and of course, myself. After a few hours of making decorations I ran out of good ideas so I just started making vintage video game characters, so that our branch walls bore the effigy of Pac-Man, the Pac-Man ghosts, Mario, and Space Invaders. When the party eventually got started all the missionaries dressed up and were in charge of games, I chose to be Harry Potter, since it seemed like the easiest thing to do! Anyways, it was a great activity, a ton of our investigators came and a lot of the ward members, including our awesome African brethren. Everybody had a great time and we had so much candy that we were literally giving it out by the hand fulls when people left. I was surprised how readily the Russian's enjoyed Halloween, since it seems like an incredibly American holiday to spend a whole night eating candy and getting sick, but they absolutely loved it!
Last night Elder Dannenberg left for Astana. I am pretty excited for him, but I am going to miss him because we became really close friends the last few weeks we had been together. That night my new companion arrived, Elder Kvasnitsky. Do you remember a few e-mails ago when I mentioned that Elder Beck was going to come to Nizhny with his Ukrainian companion who doesn't really like me? Yep, that Ukrainian is my new companion! We've been having a good time so far and it's crazy to me that five transfers into my mission I have yet to serve with an American! I've served with a Swede, a German, a Russian and now a Ukrainian. When I eventually serve with an American I'll have collected all the possible nationalities in my mission (excluding French, because the French missionary is a sister missionary).
Well so that has been my busy week. I had a lot of meetings this week because everybody wanted to meet with us as soon as they found out that Dannenberg was leaving. We must have travelled the whole width and length of Nizhny twenty times over last week! I will be sending some pictures of the African and Halloween party as soon as I can and I'm sorry that this letter is somewhat devoid of funny stories or interesting details. I don't know if you can tell over the medium of electronic mail communication (probably not, since you can't see my body language or hear my paralinguals) but I am absolutely exhausted!
Stay excellent my friends.
As Always,
Elder Zachery Brasier
Moscow Time
No comments:
Post a Comment