Dear Family and Loyal Blog Readers,
Before I forget I must tell you some very important news. Our P-Day is changing to Monday now. That means this following Monday will be a P-Day for me and then after that no more P-Day's on Thursday. This is very important to know, since new posts should be going up on Monday and any e-mails that are sent to me need to be sent before Monday (from my point of view.)
Ok so now that the logistics are over I can talk about my week. I must be honest with you, this has been a rough week. Our baptismal date with Olga will have to be moved back since she is having the hardest time making it to church on Sunday and if she doesn't come to church two more times over the next two weeks we are going to have to keep moving the date back, which is quite unfortunate because we were hoping to have her baptized by the end of the year, and it is looking increasingly less likely that this will happen. Also one of our promising investigators dropped off the face of the Earth, another decided that she doesn't want to meet with us as much because she doesn't like Elder Kvasnitsky and a ton of other problems have been occurring.
On a more positive and interesting note, transfer calls came in today. It looks like I will be staying in Nizhny Novgorod for at least another six weeks and I will be receiving a new companion, Elder Melor. Once he is my companion I will have officially served with every possible nationality at this time: Russian, German, Swede, Ukranian and finally American with Elder Melor. I am excited to serve with him especially because he is a hard worker so we are really going to be able to progress our current investigators and find new ones. An unfortunate side-effect of the transfer though is that Elder Olsen is leaving to Tula, which is quite unfortunate since I really enjoyed having him around in Nizhny Novgorod. I am hoping that I will be able to serve with him sometime down the road, or at least be in the same city again.
Christmas is in swing her in Russia, which actually isn't that different from the rest of the year. For Russians Christmas is a secondary holiday to the New Years, so they don't go all out like the Americans do and make everything Christmas themed and such, but on New Years I hear that they go nuts. So I'm excited for that. It is just weird for me to not have everybody get excited for Christmas and see a bunch of Christmas lights and such. Interestingly enough though, I think in a way this is good, because with out all the commercial and outwardly ornate parts of Christmas I have been able to truly focus on the meaning of the holiday, that is the birth of Jesus Christ.
I really don't have much more exciting things to tell you right now. Today we went to the GAZ car factory in Nizhny, which was set up by Henry Ford during the 1920's to manufacture knock-off Model A cars in Russia. GAZ is now one of the major car factories in Russia so we got to see their whole history and toured a huge show room with a ton of Russian cars in it, which was awesome. In the very back of the show room that had a big GAZ Armored Personnel Carrier, which was open and you can look inside. Being missionaries, we of course wanted to climb inside this APC, but we weren't quite sure if it was allowed. So we just waited until nobody was around and then Elder Olsen, Sister Cianflone and I took an internal tour of a Russian APC. I got some sweet pictures of us sticking out of the hatches and just pretty much being dumb 19-20 year olds in a tank. Also, we learned all about the car that the KGB drove in the old Soviet times, known colloquially as the "Night Warren" and always painted black. Yes, this was a quite ominous car.
Well I'll probably be writing again on Monday, but I'm not too sure. So everybody have a great week and enjoy the Christmas season!
Sincerely,
Elder Zachery Brasier
Moscow Time
No comments:
Post a Comment