The last day or two here
haven't actually been all that bad. and by not all that bad I mean that it's
been hovering right around freezing. I'm sure it'll get much colder in the next
couple months.
The traveling to Ivano-Frankivsk was pretty
interesting. Everyone has to do registration paperwork when they arrive in the country, and so they send the paperwork to where
you're assigned to be serving. Apparently I was originally supposed to be
going to ivano-frankivsk, but that got changed to Rivne last-minute, so all my paperwork was in another town. We had to go there to sign a couple forms. Our bus left at 6:00
on Tuesday morning. We woke up at 4:30 and took a taxi to the bus
station. We got on the bus, and it turns out they don't actually have any
heaters on the bus. so the first few hours of the bus ride before the sun came
up were super, super cold. I was sitting next to the window and my jacket
actually froze to the window -- it was really cold. Luckily, I was prepared and had worn warm clothes, so I was able to sleep a little bit at the beginning
of the ride. Then for the rest of the day we just rode on the bus, making stops
at every little village along the way. There were probably something like 20-30
different stops. It was cool to see some of the smaller towns in
the countryside because we really only spend time in the cities usually. We also
had a 45 minute stop in Ternopil at lunch time. Ternopil is actually one
of the biggest cities in this part of the country, but there's no missionaries there. So it was cool to see a part of the city that
other missionaries don't get to see.
We arrived in Ivano in the middle of the afternoon,
did some paperwork, went to dinner with some of the missionaries there. (I
tried chicken stomach -- it was pretty good.) We then went to their English class
in that town. For the return trip, we managed to get on a train instead of a
bus, which was way nicer. The train left at 5:00 in the morning. We woke up at 3:30, walked through the city (that we aren't familiar with) for half an hour to the train station, bough tickets and got on the train.
Fortunately though, we had a coupe to ourselves, so we had beds to sleep on
which was super nice. That was about a three hour train ride to L'viv, and then
from there we got on another 3-ish hour train ride back to Rivne. So the return
trip was a bit shorter and definitely more pleasant than the trip to Ivano. We have to go back next week to finish up the paperwork, so we get
to do it all over again.
I didn't get any pictures, but I wish I had. I was super tired and I thought I would be coming back the same way the next day so I didn't think to take any pictures. It was also pretty hard to see anything out of the frozen windows of the bus. A lot of the places look the same, but there were definitely some cool towns in the hills. Ivano-Frankivsk was also a super cool city. It was just a lot more modern than Rivne. It's nice to know that not everything looks exactly the same as here.
On Thursday we had exchanges, so I was with
another brand new missionary. We fumbled our way around the city. We
were able to talk to a couple people on the streets who gave us their phone
number and said they might be interested in meeting, though,
We also taught a couple lessons this past week to some
interesting people. One of them was super cool because he spoke Spanish (he lived
in Spain for 7 years) so I was able to talk to him about
that. It was super interesting, when he would speak Spanish I could understand
everything he said no problem, but then if I tried to speak Spanish back it
would just come out as Ukrainian. There's only space in my head for two
languages, I guess.
The other lesson we taught was with a guy who called us
and said he wanted to meet. We met up with him and started getting to know him.
Turns out, he told us he had a vision where he saw all of the lottery numbers
for the next day in America, and I guess the missionaries were the only Americans he knew of, so he called us to meet so we could help him buy
lottery tickets. Well, we told him we weren't allowed to do that, but if you
hear anything in the news about a Ukrainian guy winning the lottery, let me
know.
Not much else going on today. We have a lesson with the guy
who speaks Spanish tonight. For the past few days we've been doing a 12 days of Christmas thing with a few families in the branch where we just go drop off
some sweets or some fruit or some toys or something at their door each night.
So we'll be doing that tonight. It was supposed to be a mystery who was
actually doing it, but I'm pretty sure all the families know it was us by now.
Mostly because this isn't a thing that Ukrainian people would do--so they know it
must be Americans. either way it's still nice to do something nice for people.
Sounds like there's a lot of fun stuff going on at home.
Glad to hear that Cocoa is still going strong. There are no Mexican restaurants in Ukraine. They are
very afraid of spicy food. They do have pretty good pizza though.
Ok, I gotta head out soon, but I'll talk to you guys on Sunday! Hopefully you have a great Christmas. I'll be in l'viv a few days this
week for a mission conference and a Christmas party (or something like that) so I'll tell you all about it on Sunday.
Alec
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