Friday, November 4, 2016

Birthday At The MTC

News from Alec . . .

Hey guys!

That's awesome my friends came over on my birthday and I'm glad it made you feel a little bit better. Unfortunately I can't even take the credit for the idea. Kimberly emailed me last week if I thought it would be okay and I said to go for it. So it was all her who planned it, not me.


Can you guess which one is Alec?
For Halloween there's not too much to do here. In the morning, though, we had Sister H. teaching us and she's pretty relaxed about stuff so some of us brought costumes to clas. She walked in and thought it was all very funny. We took them off right after that to respect the rules, but it was cool to dress up. The rest of the day was pretty normal, except we kept yelling "Happy Galloveen," which is Halloween in Russian, because it's a lot cooler than how it sounds in Ukrainian. 

At night, we went back to the residence and kinda went trick or treating. It turned into more of a parade around all four floors of the building with a bunch of different missionaries joining in on the fun. I attached a couple pictures, one in the classroom building and one in the dorm. See if you can guess which person I am.

My favorite costume was Elder Abraham dressed as a pumpkin. Elder Shuley also had his parents send him a Trump mask, which everyone thought was pretty funny


My birthday was pretty fun, too. Thank you so much for the package with all of the cards and gifts, they were all very much appreciated. I also got a bunch of emails and Dear Elders from others, which I appreciate a lot, too. The cake was a huge surprise. It came in on Monday and luckily one of the people in my district has a mini-fridge in his room(idk why, it's literally the only room in the building that came with a fridge) so I kept the cake in there until my birthday. Every one was wishing me "з Днем народження" all day long. It's pronounced "zdnem narodzhennya" - that first sound is pretty hard to make. It literally means something like "with the day of your birth" but translates to happy birthday. On the message Dad copied from Facebook, Grandpa wrote, literally, "happy day of birth" (but in Russian, not Ukrainian.) I had a lot of Russians say happy birthday to me, too, and I don't know exactly how they say it in Russia, but i get what he wrote. 

After we went back to the dorm that night, we had the cake, which everyone thought was super good, so thank you so much for that. And then my district got me a card and Sister H. bought me a full-page magnifier from the store, cause she found out that I did sciecne shows in Chapel Hill and thought that that was the most scientific thing she could find, even though I have 20/20 vision. Thank you for all the gifts y'all sent too. Looks like there's some excellent hymns and classical music on the iPod and that comfort strap thing for my bag is much more comfortable. One more thing - President Russell M. Nelson was our devotional speaker on Tuesday, too, So, overall it was a pretty good birthday.

So, Game 7 went to 10 innings? That's insane. If you want to get me a Christmas present that you don't have to send to me, I'd love to have an official 2016 World Series Championship t-shirt. 

That's crazy that Obama was in Chapel Hill. That's pretty historic. I doubt he stayed there over night, but if he did, he probably would have stayed at Morehead Planetarium. There's like a presidential suite where all visiting dignitaries stay. 

I attached a bunch of pictures.



We got our Ukrainian name tags a week or two ago. Does the spelling of Martschenko look familiar? I think it's the same as we had on those t-shirts a while ago. 





I hung up those bats you guys sent with all of those extra shoelaces I have now as some Halloween decorations. So far we haven't gotten in trouble for it on room inspections so, they're probably staying up the rest of the time here. 












I attached a few pictures of the temple that I took just for fun.









On Wednesday night, we have PCL (personal, companion, and language study) which is basically just three hours without a teacher. So, we decided for personal study some of us would take a walk to the temple to watch the sun set. My camera is no good so i didn't really get any good pictures but it's a pretty good view because the temple is up a bit on the mountain so you can look down on the valley and see the BYU football stadium and Utah lake and see the sun set over the mountains on the other side of the lake. It's a pretty nice view at sunset, but it gets cold pretty quickly after that ,so we walked back to the MTC. 



We also decided to do our temple session early this morning instead of in the afternoon, so I here's a picture of walking there in the dark this morning. 




Here's a picture of my birthday card from my district. Lots of the notes are in Ukrainian and it's blurry but you can try to read whatever you want. 



Also here's a picture of the Christmas lights they put up here in the MTC. Unfortunately, they've only had them on for that first night and they've been off since. I guess they're waiting til after Thanksgiving, but I'll be gone by then. Speaking of that, I should get my flight plans tomorrow. We did manage to get some pictures with the lights though that first night. It was pretty cool, everyone was out there hanging out and some people were singing Christmas carols, too. 


I think that once we get the flight plans they actually let us email home real quick to let you know when. Most likely I'll be flying out very, very early Tuesday morning (Nov 15), arriving in Ukraine sometime between Wednesday and Thursday, but i really don't know for sure. They do let us call home from the airport, so i'll let you know what time to expect that. You might have to wake up in the middle of the night if you want to talk to me. There's 12 of us, so i would be impressed if they fit us all on the same flight, but apparently they usually do. But they usually don't have that many missionaries going to the same place all at once though, so who knows. Some of the other missionaries I've known have had some pretty long layovers, so hopefully we'll be together if we get stuck in an airport for 18 hours.

Gotta go, but love you guys!

Alec

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