A Quick Visit Back to Uzhhorod

Alec returns to Uzhhorod to help train new missionaries.

OK, as for stuff over here, we spent most of our week with our exchange in Uzhhorod. Mission leaders don't usually leave their cities to do exchanges, but the mission president made exchanges cause there's only two missionaries down there, both pretty new, who don't really understand each other cause one is Ukrainian and one is American. So we went down to Uzhhorod to help them out. It was super sweet to get to go back down there, it was kind of like a little vacation for me to go back to that city and see some people there. 

Christmas activity at the branch in Uzhhorod.

We left Thursday morning and got there in the afternoon. We helped them with their English practice (which they kind of need, it's hard to do English practice with only one English speaker). Then the next day we spent most of the time preparing for a Christmas activity we planned with them. We kinda wanted to do the same stuff we've done here in Ivano-Frankivsk, so we made some salt-dough ornaments and gingerbread houses. Not a ton of people came (a ton of people never come in Uzhhorod) but it was still a fun activity. 

The coolest part of the exchange was the next day, though. We just happened to be there the day of a baptism. It was the mother of a member that I had become good friends with when I was there, so when they found out that I was going to be there on that day, they asked me to baptize her, so that was neat. It ended up being an eventful baptism, with her almost fainting as she tried to walk out of the water, but in the end everything was OK and she was still smiling, after she took a few minutes to recover. That's the kind of thing that only happens in Uzhhorod. 

Alec performs another baptism in Uzhhorod.

 I attached a ton of pictures from our time in Uzhhorod. It was a cool little break and a great chance to go back to a familiar place.

Elder Podvodov, an area 70, was at church yesterday and he had a meeting with us and the branch mission leader about helping missionary work in the branch.

Farewell to the sister missionaries in Ivano-Frankivsk.

This morning we went to the train station to say goodbye to one of our sister missionaries who is heading home. Unfortunately, since she's leaving mid-transfer, that means we won't have any sister missionaries in the city for the next month, which is super unfortunate. But also now that she's gone home, my MTC group is now officially the most senior missionaries in the mission, so that's neat.

Not super surprised that Abbie won Fear Factor at Universal Studios. If I could do it I'm sure she could, too.

For the Skype call I still don't know exactly. The thing is on Monday the branch is doing a caroling activity in the afternoon and then we got invited for a Christmas dinner with a couple of the families in the branch, so we don't really have a ton of time. And there's only one computer in the church so we have to coordinate it with all the other missionaries. I could do it the day before or the day after if that's better for y'all. Just let me know and I'll check my email in a few days and let you know the exact details. Idk, it's all the same to me, I'll just have to try to remember my Skype password. Google might be easier.

Hope y'all have a great week and a Merry Christmas!

Alec

P.S. The pics are all mixed up but hopefully you can sort it out. They're pretty much all from Uzhhorod, I think. There are a couple pics of the Christmas video up on the big screen at the L'viv train station, which is pretty neat. We've been going pretty hard with all that stuff so that's cool.

Making the Most of Christmas in Ukraine

We've had a couple decent snow storms so far. Each time we get a few inches and then within a couple days its all melted. It seems like it's not actually all that cold, but just when it snows it snows so much that it ends up just sticking anyway.

   

The Skype call thing on Christmas Day will be tricky a little bit. It would be super cool if grandpa was there, do you know when he'll be there? We got invited somewhere for dinner Christmas night, so the latest I could do it is like 4 o'clock my time. So that would be like 9 o'clock over there. Idk, I could also do it the next day or the day before, but the timing might be weird and I don't know when grandpa will be there. Right now we'll plan on 4 o'clock my time Christmas day for now, but we can still change it.

As for housing for school next fall, I honestly have no idea. I don't really know how the whole process works. Definitely not on-campus. If the tap water is drinkable and the hot water is reliable, then it'll be a step up from what I've had here, so I'm not super picky. As for roommates, I really don't know. Ill ask a few of my friends who might still be around Chapel Hill next year and see what I can find. 

The branch here is good. It's by far the biggest one I've served in with about 45 people at church each week. There's some really cool members and 2 or 3 really great families, which are pretty hard to come by in the church in Ukraine. It's definitely not quite a fully-staffed branch, but there are presidents for most of the auxiliary organizations and stuff, so we do have a pretty good branch council (which basically consists of all the really active members.)

The whole mission is still on the 2-hour block. That'll probably be a permanent change cause if you ask my mission president, the whole church will be moving over to 2-hour blocks soon. 

As for my last week, the biggest thing was going to L'viv for Mission Leadership Council on Wednesday. There, we found out that we as zone leaders are going to be going down to Uzhhorod for exchanges this week (that's why I was buying train tickets). There's only one companionship in that city, with one Ukrainian who barely knows English and one new missionary who barely knows Ukrainian. So we're headed down there to make sure that everything is going well with them. I'm super excited to head back to Uzhhorod and see all the people down there, and if everything goes according to plan we should be there for a baptism on Saturday of a woman that I taught while I was there. so that should be pretty neat. It's about a 10-hour trip to get there, so that'll be half of our week. Should be a lot of fun.

Other than that, this past week we had another Christmas activity. We got permission to show It's a Wonderful Life. It ended up being the biggest hassle in the entire world, literally nothing worked. It took us forever just to find a way that we could legally buy it. And then forever to figure out a way to get subtitles to work with Amazon. And then all the technology to actually show it wouldn't work. First the computer didn't have an HDMI port, then it didn't even have a wi-fi adapter, and then the Amazon app on the TV didn't work, and then the projector couldn't connect with the computer. It was the biggest disaster ever, but we finally just played it on the computer. So, yeah, it was kind of a disaster, But it's a super good movie and people seemed to enjoy it so that's good.

Also, we had a little lesson with a recent convert. He works as a security guard at a museum, so he invited us to just stop by at his work. He showed us around the museum and made us take pictures of every little thing, so I attached a couple of those. I did get a cool pic with a classic Ukrainian instrument though, called a bandura. 

That's about it for the week. We finally got Ukrainian #lighttheworld calendars from Kev, only 9 days too late. so now we can start doing a bit more with that. This next week should be a lot of fun with exchanges in Uzhhorod. So hopefully I'll have some cool pics next week.

Alec

Road Trip to Yaremche

Alec and his companions slide into Yaremche, Ukraine.

We actually got real snow for the first time this past week. Last year there was tons of snow in mid-November, so we had a couple more weeks of no snow this year. We got about 5 inches of snow, pretty much all in one morning. Judging by the weather forecast it looks like it's not gonna stick around too long.

Winter returns to Ukraine.

 The big thing this week was transfers. We lost our native Ukrainian missionary and one of the sisters and picked up a couple American missionaries. All of the members were super super sad to see the Ukrainian go, They definitely much prefer working with natives than with Americans. But, oh well, we're all they got. 

On Friday we did a kick-off activity for #lighttheworld (super crazy that Abbie auditioned for the video, I've seen it like a million times by now so that would have been super weird.) We basically invited everyone from English practice and the members -- and did some Christmas stuff. One of the ideas for service for the first day was to write a thank you note (or something like that) so we had everyone come and write thank you notes and then we made some salt-dough ornaments and got some paint so everyone could paint an ornament and give it to the person they wanted to thank. I left my SD card at home so I don't have any pics of this, sorry.

Anyway I don't think anyone actually gave the thank you cards to anyone, but it was fun and a lot of people came so it was a success. We also made some pretty good hot chocolate (thank you Martha Stewart) and we have tons of leftover, so I'll be able to use that insulated cup y'all got me. Thanks again for the package, by the way, lots of good stuff in there.

And then today for p-day we made a pretty good trip to a town called Yaremche, about an hour and a half away. It's basically a little touristy town right in the middle of the mountains with like skiing and other stuff like that. We're not allowed to go skiing but we did do some souvenir shopping and walked around a bit into some nature. There's some decent views and with the snow it all looked pretty cool. We also had a super cool dog follow us around. and of course I got a pic in my hammock. I just had to walk through a semi-frozen creek to get to the spot.

Anyway that's about it for this past week (there's probably more stuff that happened but I don't have my camera so I don't remember it, lol.) Hope y'all have a good week!

Scene from Yaremche.

Alec

Ukrainian Thanksgiving

Alec finally gest his birthday package.

The week almost kind of felt like a holiday week. We got the first bit of real snow falling from the sky (it's actually snowing right now,) but so far it's been too warm for any of it to stick, so it's just cold and wet everywehre instead.

I did get your package on Tuesday though, Thank you very much for that. I'm drinking some hot chocolate out of the cup y'all got right now. The hand warmers are very much appreciated, even though I'm sketching a little bit about the electronic ones. That seems very much like it's just a disaster waiting to happen. Intentionally overheating batteries just seems like a bad idea. Oh well, so far they work really well, so I hope the Amazon reviews were positive. Also super funny y'all sent that Milka Oreo Chocolate Bar. That's straight from Belgium and they sell Milka Chocolate everywhere here.

​

We also had our big "Thanksgiving" activity on Saturday. It was very much not Thanksgiving and very much just a bunch of Ukrainian food. It was just a big pot luck with the branch, and I was super super surprised that people actually brought food and it ended up working really well. After every one ate, we showed the Christmas video and explained how the Light The World program is going to work and tried to get people excited for it. We're planning on going super hard with it this year, so hopefully it works out. The good news is that they ended up making new localized versions of the videos for a bunch of different countries, and the Russian/Ukrainian ones fixed the super bad spelling mistake, so we don't have to deal with that anymore. You can find the new video on the Ukrainian page of mormon.org, They just made some minor changes, but it's pretty well done. 

Speaking of the video, we also worked with an advertising company to get it set up on a big screen right in the center of town. It cost about $250 to get it to play twice an hour all day long for the entire month, so we decided why not? And now we've already got it up there playing, and I attached a couple pics of it.

Light the World playing in city center.

 For Thanksgiving itself though, I decided to go out to a restaurant and just get a bunch of food to celebrate. It was very Ukrainian food, but all pretty tasty. I attached a pic of my apple streudel dessert--it was almost like apple pie.

And then the other big thing for this past week was the mission president visiting on Tuesday. During my interview with him we talked about pharm school, and he said I'll be able to make it back in time to get started, which is a pretty big relief cause in the past with other missionaries he has been very much against missionaries going home even a couple weeks early for school. So definitely very relieved all that worked out. Now he just has to write a formal request to get it approved by the missionary department (aka a member of the quorum of the twelve) and then everything should be good to go (that's why I needed the dates last week.) Definitely a big relief. If the first day I have to be on campus is August 1st though, there's a pretty good chance that I'll get home that Wednesday and then pretty much go straight to Chapel Hill from the airport. That'll be fun.

The only other cool thing from this week was that I saw the new Star Wars poster. Idk, maybe everyone in America already knows about this, but there was a veryyy interesting thing I learned from the Ukrainian translation. In English jedi can be plural or singular, but in Ukrainian there's two different words for singular and plural jedi, and so I noticed on the poster that it's plural. Idk maybe everyone already knows about this, but it kind of blew my mind.

That's about it for this past week. Here's some pictures of our Thanksgiving activity . . .

. . . and from hanging out with some people from English . . .

 and the first snow and a pigeon. 

Hope y'all have a great week!

Alec

Another Week in Ivano-Frankivsk

Alec and his companions in Ukraine.

We don't really have anything planned for Thanksgiving. The branch is doing a lunch thing on Saturday, but it will not at all be like a real Thanksgiving. We'll probably just make something.

We did a little bit of service for our interesting Canadian member, helping him finish his greenhouse before the winds come and world war 3 starts next year. So good thing we got that all ready for him. Last time we were there it was super cold and raining, so at least the weather was nice this time.

We also did some more service helping the branch president's mom get her visa ready to go to England. For some reason, she thought it would be a good idea to get a new passport (to change her last name to match her husbands) right in the middle of the visa application process. She wanted to know if that would have a negative impact on her visa application decision. Well, of course, that will have a negative impact on her visa application decision, but we still had to spend 3 hours calling a bunch of different people and emailing people to get a solid confirmation of that from the embassy. British English is almost as hard to understand as African English too, so it was a lot of fun. But now we'll probably have to restart the application process from the beginning when she gets her new passport.

Other than that we had a good, slightly unorthodox sacrament meeting. Our former branch president was giving a talk and he started sending text messages to members of the congregation and having them stand up and read them as an object lesson. Right in the middle of sacrament meeting. That's Ukraine for ya.

Some of our friends from English practice have really started to like Bananagrams. we play it during our game night with them and they seem to like it. They use the most ridiculous words sometimes though.

Game night at English practice.

I have a couple pics, just a cool house in downtown Ivano-Frankivsk that looks a lot like downtown Raleigh . . . 

. . . and a car with a Connecticut license plate. 

I don't know if I sent these already but there's also some pics of the university where we do a special English practice every Wednesday (at top.)

Have a good week and Happy Thanksgiving!

Alec

Sore Muscles

The big highlight of this past week was a baptism on Saturday. The second counselor in the branch presidency's son was baptized. He's 10 years old and for the past forever his mom hasn't allowed him to be baptized or meet with the missionaries or anything, but just recently she gave him permission to do "whatever he wanted," so the other elders had been working with him and he was baptized on Saturday. 

The building here doesn't have a font either, like most of them here, but we do have a portable font, basically just a big portable jacuzzi looking thing that they ordered from baptistry.com. Lol.

Also, on Friday night, the night before the baptism, we got a call from our branch president asking for some help. Apparently he ordered a bunch of concrete to his house on Saturday and he forgot about the baptism and he was gonna need some help getting it all unloaded to make it back on time for the baptism. So we take a taxi out to his house on the outskirts of town, expecting to be unloading bags of dry cement mix from a truck or something. We show up and there is a full-blown cement mixer pulled into the tiny road in his village pouring concrete into a wooden form in his front yard. So we go and basically spend a couple hours shoveling wet cement and getting it all in place and everything in time. Definitely ruined my tennis shoes, but it was a pretty interesting experience.

I was kinda sore after that, but definitely not as sore as I was after our investigators invited us to go to the gym with them. This was actually last week, but I forgot. Basically, this couple is super jacked and they decided to invite us and show us how they work out. I haven't done any kind of weight lifting in well over a year, so after doing some squats and dead lifts, I was pretty destroyed for the entire next week. Super cool but super uncomfortable for the rest of the week.

And then, lastly, last night we had a big birthday party for the brother of the branch president, a recent convert. His mother made a huge meal for us, and it was actually the first time I've had a classic Ukrainian meal in quite a long time. Probably since last winter in Rivne. Of course she brought out the classic meat jello. This is only the second time I've had to try it, and it was actually a little better than the first time, but I still almost threw up trying to swallow it. But she made a pretty good cake afterward.

Other than that, not too much happened this week, none of the computers here have card readers, so I can't really upload any pictures just yet, but I'll attach some and some videos from our science activity last week. Some of the videos are super long and in Ukrainian, so don't bother watching all of it. Just don't make a video montage to some weird song this time.

Also, here's some more pics from last week. I don't know if I attached them last week or not but basically we went out to the branch president's house to do some service and helped him use concrete to fill in some holes on the side of his house. He has some chickens and bunnies, the bunnies names are Christmas, New Years, and Mark's Birthday, if that gives you any idea what the bunnies are for​.

Hope y'all have a great week!

Alec

Science & Religion

Alec uses his Morehead Planetarium Science Show skills to teach gospel lessons to children in Ukraine.

This week was pretty busy here. I have a ton of pictures, but as of now no way to upload them cause the computer in this library doesn't have a card reader, so those might come later. 

First of all, on Monday for p-day all the missionaries got together to do some pumpkin carving. It was surprisingly difficult to find good pumpkins for carving but we managed to find a couple good American-looking ones. Ukrainians make no distinction between pumpkins and squashes, so we ended up carving a few squashes as well. I ended up doing the basic UNC symbol, and honestly I think it turned out pretty OK, considering the fact that I did it totally free form with no reference to go off of.

Then on Wednesday we had MLC in L'viv. So we woke up at 3:30 in the morning to make it to the train station for our 5 o'clock train. But at least we could lay down and sleep for the three-hour trip. So then we got to L'viv and went to the mission office for the missionary leadership council meeting. It's basically all the zone leaders and assistants to the president and sister training leaders (only like 8 people in total) who meet and talk about the mission and about what we should be doing better. A lot of the time was talking about the new #lighttheworld campaign for Christmas. We're trying to go pretty hard with it. Apparently, it only costs like 80 bucks to get an ad spot on a huge TV screen in center for an entire month, so we might look into that. The videos not available yet to the public but we watched it as missionaries. It's pretty good, as usual--just one unfortunate problem. There's a part where they show different boxes marked "donations" in lots of different languages and stuff. One of the languages is Russian, and the word for donation is пожертвование. I guess they didn't know how to pluralize Russian words, so they just decided to add an "s" to the end, пожертвованиеs. That letter doesn't even exist in Cyrillic, so that's kind of unfortunate. other than that though it's a great video.

So yeah, it was a pretty interesting meeting, and the mission resident's wife made us taco soup, and everyone sang me Happy Birthday, and one of the senior couples gave me a piece of Texas sheet cake, so all in all it was pretty cool. Afterwards we got some dinner in L'viv, then hopped on a train back to Ivano. We got back around 8 and had a little time, so we stopped by the L'viv chocolate cafe and got some drinkable melted chocolate to celebrate my birthday. 

The next day, we celebrated a bit more with the rest of the missionaries here. I realized I've never tried sushi in Ukraine, so I decided to go for it. We ended up going during happy hour, so we got a lot of sushi. It definitely wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting, and 2 dollars for more sushi than I could eat is not too bad, either.

The next big thing this week was a branch activity Saturday night. It was just a fireside with one of the families in the branch. Before I had even arrived in Ivano, one of them heard that I did science type shows before the mission, so he decided to do a science-themed night. He called it "gospel laboratory." So he ended up doing a couple demonstrations, and I ended up doing a couple things from my shows. I did the one with the big long bag you have to blow air into, and the one with the leaf blower that can hold the ball up in the air. I also did the thing with corn starch and water to make a non-Newtonian fluid. It was super fun and people seemed to actually really enjoy it. The idea was to do a science experiment, explain it,  and then relate it to some gospel topic. Turns out my Ukrainian is definitely not good enough to explain complex scientific topics, so we pretty much just went straight to the gospel parallel. It was a super fun activity, and it was cool to bring in some skills from before the mission. 

On Friday we did some service on for the branch president, but it'll be way better to explain it with pictures so I'll wait til I can get those uploaded. 

I do have a few pictures though, mostly from our pumpkin activity a few weeks ago. And a few from the science night, but I'll have some more and some videos a little bit later.

OK, have a great week!

Alec

Night of the Pumpkin

The Pumpkin Party. Not the Halloween Party.

We were pretty busy this past week. We had five different activities over the week, so lots of stuff going on. Tuesday was normal English practice and a self-reliance seminar at the same time, Friday was a special art night we did as missionaries, Saturday was our "Pumpkin Night" (cause we can't do Halloween-themed activities) and then on Sunday the whole branch went to L'viv for the district conference. 

Making another pinata.

Soo we were very busy preparing for all of that. We also as zone leaders have had to start prepping for the mission leadership council on Wednesday, so we've been pretty busy lately. Lots of the time was spent making our pumpkin pinata. I swear all I've done on my mission is make pinatas. This one actually turned out pretty ok, but then the bottom was still a little wet and we ended up having to duct tape it. And I guess we did a few too many layers and it was kinda hard to break it. But that's ok, it let everyone get a chance to beat it. 

I thought it was pretty funny how much work we did for our activity, considering they told us the branch would take care of everything and especially considering the fact that we weren't really supposed to take part in any Halloweeny things (can't have the orthodox people thinking we're devil-worshippers or anything). We pretty much ended up doing everything. I'm not complaining, it's just funny how those things always work out. 

It was a pretty good activity though, a good amount of people came and we did some good classic activities, like bobbing for apples and toilet paper mummy wraps. I attached a ton of pictures from it, so have fun looking through.

Bobbing for apples at the Pumpkin Party.

The pinata!

The other things that took up a lot of time this week was service. On Tuesday our member from Canada, (I wrote to you a while ago about him, he has some interesting conspiracy theories) asked us to come help him put some plastic on his greenhouse. It ended up taking a super long time in the cold rain to do it, but at least his plants will be protected from the wind when the second sun shows up in the sky sometime next year. And his wife made some pretty good spaghetti and meatballs for us after so that's cool

We also spent a ton of time on Friday doing some service. after doing registration stuff for three hours with him, We went to our branch president's home to help his mother translate some applications for her to go to England to be with her husband. We didn't think it would take super long, but turns out British bureaucracy is awful and their online application system is awful, So we ended up sitting there for about 6 hours trying to figure it out. There's a picture of elder Lukach sitting at the computer that i attached. It just makes me glad to be an American that speaks English and never really has to deal with that kind of stuff. But we got it done and she brought us huge chocolate bars to the activity the next night to figure it out. so that's cool.

And then Sunday was the big district conference with all the members in the whole mission in L'viv. We woke up early Sunday (but we also moved our clocks back Sunday night so it wasn't too bad) to get on our bus with the rest of the members to L'viv. i tried teaching the kid sitting next to me how to do a rubik's cube, but he wasn't quite getting it.

It was kind of a disaster once we got there, cause there was a big marathon or something in L'viv, so half the roads were shut down and none of the branches were actually able to get to the church. We ended up starting about an hour late once everyone got there. It was a good conference and it was super cool to see all the members from all the previous branches I've served in. I attached a picture with my homie from Uzhhorod who will be serving in Pittsburgh in a couple weeks. 

This week will probably be pretty busy too, I'll be in L'viv on Wednesday for missionary leadership council, so that should be fun. Probably hit up McDonald's or something for a birthday dinner afterward.

Oh i also attached a picture of a burger I made . . .

 . . . and some weird looking pizza I got at a restaurant last week . . .

Hope you have a great week!

Alec​

Settling into Ivano-Frankivsk

A final goodbye (again) to Alec's English students in Ternopil before heading off to Ivano-Frankivsk.

  This week there have been a lot of changes. I went from the second smallest branch in the mission to one of the very biggest (about 45 people at church.) I felt like I was back in America when I was at church yesterday--there were so many kids running around and noises and it was just very different from what I'm used to. It's also super weird having a branch that actually contributes stuff. We're doing a big "pumpkin" activity (cause we can't do Halloween activities) on Saturday, and all we as missionaries have to do is bring a pinata. I'm more accustomed to running the whole activity, so this'll be pretty nice.

I left Khmelnitskiy on Tuesday morning to go to Ternopil for English and then straight from Ternopil went to L'viv. I stayed in L'viv Tuesday night, and then got up super early to catch a train to Ivano-Frankivsk. I've already been in this city several times for registration or for exchanges or whatever, so I already knew what to expect and kind of how to get around. 

The apartment we have is pretty nice, actually. It's just a side apartment to a house (which is super rare in Ukraine) so we actually have kind of a front yard, kind of. The best part is that the neighbors have a really cool dog. 

Lots of this week was spent doing little service things like helping members move furniture or carry stuff back from the market, but we also spent some time stopping by inactive members, without much success. Only one person yelled at us though, so that's not too bad. 

On Wednesday we went to a university to do a little English practice for them there. It was very impromptu and a lot of people showed up, so we kind of just did a little q&a and let them ask us questions, and then did a bit of discussion. People looove talking to Americans. It kind of blows their mind sometimes, honestly. Makes you feel pretty popular.

Ivano-Frankivsk is a very cool city and I'm excited to be here. Next week we'll be having tons of interesting activities, including going to L'viv on Sunday for a district conference. It'll be cool to see all the members from the other cities I've served in. One of them, from Uzhhorod, actually just got her mission call to Pittsburgh. Everyone was pretty surprised cause her English is super super bad, and they in the past don't usually call people to English-speaking missions if they don't at least know English a little bit. But, it's gonna be super cool for her to be in America. She did a tonnnnn to help us out in Uzhhorod, so I might have you send her a birthday package or something when she gets to America.

That's about it for this week. I don't have a ton of pictures for you cause I left my SD card in Khmelnitskiy. Sorry. I'll get it back this week though so it's ok. The pictures i do have are from my last day in Ternopil. It was super awkward actually, cause I had told everyone last week that it was gonna be my last day, and then I ended up coming back on Tuesday for one more. So that was weird, but cool to see them one last time.

. . . and Ternopil loved Alec!

That's super interesting about grandma's ancestors coming from Galicia. Here, it's called Галичина and I knew it translated to Galicia, I just never made the connection that that's where they're from. That's very interesting. They could very well be from these cities where I'm serving.

Hope y'all have a great week!

Alec

Last Days in Khmelnitskiy

Alec enjoying the sights on his personal day.

I got the package! 

Oversized missionary package!

Thank you very much. The juggling balls were a good touch. Y'all managed to find the jankiest Bananagrams I've ever seen, but it works great and it's a lot lighter, so thank you! And, don't worry about the weight of the package, it doesn't really matter. It can just be a bit of a pain to carry it back if we get unlucky with travel plans. I attached a pic of one of my old companions and the package he got last week. so at least it wasn't that!

The transfer thing wasn't anything crazy, really. Just the new guy coming here was traveling all day on Monday, so he didn't have a chance to write. So we all just waited until Tuesday to write so he could do it this morning. The other news though is that I'm leaving Khmelnitskisyksiksyisy. I'll be doing my last English practice in Ternopil today, and then from there spending the night in L'viv. And then Wednesday morning I'll be heading off to move to Ivano-Frankivsk. I'll be a zone leader there with Elder Sanders. I've spent time in that city before on exchanges and stuff and it's a pretty nice city. There's also a really strong branch there, so that'll be a nice change from my last two cities, where there were no more than five active members. 

The weather here has definitely been pretty cold already. The last few days have been warmer, but I've already had to start wearing a winter coat. Super unfortunate. 

This past week was pretty busy. On Monday, we met up with a recent convert and she taught us how to make homemade varenikiy (Ukrainian pirogies). Usually we just buy them frozen, but they are wayyy better fresh and homemade. You can tell in the picture the pretty ones that she made and the awful ones we made.

Making homemade pirodies with a member in Ukraine.

Can you guess which pirogies the missionaries made?

A lot of the rest of our week was spent on Mission Conference in L'viv on Wednesday. But first, we had to go to Ternopil on Tuesday for English practice. and then we took a bus straight from there to L'viv and got in late at night. Then a cool Mission Conference the next day on Wednesday, and some time spent souvenir shopping in L'viv. Elder Protzman was getting ready to go home to America, so he wanted to get some stuff to take home. 

Alec says goodbye to his English students in Ternopil, Ukraine.

Then on Thursday we went back to Ternopil for English again. I had told everyone it was gonna be my last day, which is pretty awkward, cause I'm actually going one more time today, so I got a picture with everyone in my advanced group. They were all pretty cool people, so it was sad to say bye to them. But I had them all add me on Facebook so it's ok. 

Then Friday and Saturday were pretty normal days. The only weird thing being apartment checks on Friday. We've had no time at all to clean recently, so we spent lots of Friday morning doing that. It actually worked out super well that they came to do apartment checks that day though. There was a women's conference for members in L'viv, and we were having trouble finding a way for them to get there. There was some big holiday this past week, so all the train tickets on the way there were gone. Apparently as first counselor this was all my responsibility, so i was stressing about it a little bit. Luckily, though, they were able to catch a ride back with the senior couple that was doing the apartment checks, and then, even though all the hotels in L'viv were booked, they were able to stay with another senior missionary couple in L'viv. so I was pretty relieved all that worked out.

Then Saturday was Elder Protzman's last real day, so I got the chocolate fondue at the famous L'viv chocolate place with him. Pretty tasty, but definitely not enough chocolate. 

Chocolate fondue in L'viv, Ukraine.

On Sunday I said bye to lots of people, and got pictures with a few of them. 

Leaving friends made in Khmelnitskiy, Ukraine.

And lots of pictures of a kid named Kiril, who really loves having pictures taken of him. 

Alec and Kiril.

There's also a picture of a guy in L'viv with a Panthers jacket. 

Alec had to snap this photo of a Carolina Panthers fan in L'viv, Ukraine.

Also last Tuesday, the water in the entire city was out for almost an entire day. Apparently there was some accident at some water pumping place or something. So that's Ukraine for you.

And one more pic of a little bit of graffiti. It says "Every cosmos has it's own Gagarin." It' sounds cooler in Ukrainian, but it's pretty neat.

"Every cosmos has it's own Gagarin."

Hope you have a great week and thanks again for the package!

Alec playing Bananagrams - a game he uses to teach English to Ukrainians.

Alec

First Convert In Ternopil

Elder Martschenko and the first LDS convert in the city of Ternopil.

 This past week was pretty busy. Starting off on Tuesday, we had English practice in Ternopil, as usual. It was pretty good. My group had about 23 people, which is a bit more than usual. I started off by asking them what their dream job would be, and half of them said doctor. Turns out the reason we had so many was cause one person brought a bunch of their friends from med school. Also, since we had the perfect amount of people, I decided to do the birthday problem with them. It's the advanced group, so we basically just talk about whatever I want. The birthday problem is the one where you only need 23 people in a room to make it probable that two of them will share a birthday. So I started going around the room asking everyone their birthday. Turns out two of the new people that came were twins, so that kind of threw off my point, cause twins don't count. And then no one else had birthdays in common, so it didn't really work, unfortunately.

On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, we spent a lot of our time getting ready for General Conference. We had some cool cards printed out that we could hand out to people. We handed out 1000 of them, and no one came because of the cards. Oops. We also had exchanges on Wednesday--I was with Elder Protzman, who goes home next week. After he leaves, the group that came with me will be the most senior missionaries in the mission for almost an entire year. That's pretty weird.

We also had to buy food for conference (and make it. We did sandwiches one day and then pumpkin soup the next day. Ukrainians loved the pumpkin soup, but I thought it was pretty average. We also had to make sure the videos were downloaded, and get the projector and everything set up for it. We did all this Thursday and Friday, because we weren't actually gonna be there on Saturday for the first day of conference, so we had to put it in the hands of our members and trust them to get everything done. I was pretty worried about it actually. There's definitely a bit of a dependence on the missionaries here, but apparently everything went well, so that is great.

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The reason we weren't there on Saturday was because we spent the whole day traveling back and forth from L'viv for a baptism. The man is actually from Ternopil--the first convert ever from that city. He obviously didn't know a lot of members, since there's only one in ternopil, so we all went to L'viv to give him some support. It was in L'viv just cause it would be easier for him to take the two hour train from Ternopil than to try to do this whole thing in some kind of sauna like usual. It was super cool to travel to L'viv for the day, and he's a super cool guy. He's from Ghana, and he's in Ternopil studying to be a doctor. The 9 hours of trains back and forth was kind of a lot, but it was worth it. 

And then on Sunday we watched General Conference with the branch, except we were in the computer room watching it in English, which was much better than Ukrainian. 

This week will be another busy week. We'll be in Ternopil on Tuesday, L'viv again on Wednesday for mission conference, and then Ternopil again on Thursday. We have apartment checks on Friday, so the rest of our time will probably be spent cleaning. Haha.

Alec

Weather Turning Colder

Alec aspires for immortality.

This past week was pretty eventful. We had a branch picnic in the park on Saturday and then on Monday we went to a city about two and a half hours away with a really sweet castle.

But, most of all this past week was pretty dang cold. It was still September and I already had to bring out my winter coat and everything. Last year was one of the coldest winters ever in Ukraine, and it's looking like this year will be even colder. So maybe some hand warmers would be a nice birthday present.

On Saturday, we had a big picnic with the branch. We made kan jam out of some buckets like I did in Uzhhorod, but I'm not totally sure that they really understood it. Ukrainians aren't exactly coordinated enough with a Frisbee to be any good at kan jam. We ended up just playing ultimate with the buckets as a goal, and that worked out ok. For food, we grilled some chicken drumsticks over an open fire. It was super good, just took a very long time. The coolest part was going with a member the day before to go buy all of the food. Usually we buy our own food at a supermarket cause it's a lot easier, but we went with him to the marketplace to buy it the real Ukrainian way. It was all pretty cool and easy, just the meat was probably a little bit unsanitary. It's probably a buck or two cheaper overall though, so you gotta do what you gotta do. A good amount of people came to the activity, most of them inactive members who only show up when there's free food, but I'd say it was still moderately successful. And there's a cool WWII monument at the park, so I also got a pic with that.

And then on Monday we had our big trip to Kamyanets-Podilskiy, a good sized city about two and a half hours away. We had to get special permission from the mission president to do it cause it's outside of 50 km, but he always lets missionaries visit it every couple of transfers cause it's such a cool place. You can probably look up the geography of it better than I can explain, but as far as I understand it's a city that's built on this big plateau that was formed from a horseshoe bend in a river, so it's a great place to build a fortified castle. You can see in some of the pictures how the river cut a big natural moat around the city. It's pretty neat and it made for some cool Lord of the Rings looking pictures​.

The castle at Kamyanets-Podilskiy.

The castle itself was pretty cool, but before we went there we stopped at a restaurant on the way. It was probably the most Ukrainian meal I've ever had: There was a castle in the background . . .

 I had very ukrainian borsch (beet soup) and salo (pig fat), and most of all, a stray dog, and later a cat, wandered into the restaurant halfway through looking for food. ​

But it was pretty tasty. And then after that we went to the castle. Pretty neat. I made my own Kamyanets-Podilskiy coin by hitting it with a hammer, so that's cool.

And then we had a l ttle bit of extra time so we wandered around the city looking around. It's definitely one of the nicer places I've ever been to in Ukraine. We saw a black swan at a restaurant, and then took some stairs down into the valley part to get some cool pics by the waterfall and under the bridge. Definitely pretty neat. So, yeah, lots of pics of that.

And then I also have a pic of some kvas in Ternopil. It's basically a soft drink, and most of the time it's super gross. But, for some reason the kvas in Ternopil is really good so I always get some when I go there.

Alec in Ternopil.

Yeah, that's about it for this week. We haven't watched General Conference, yet, cause we'd be watching it in the middle of the night if we wanted to watch it live. But, we'll be doing that this weekend with the branch. We have computers in this church, so I'll probably be able to watch it in English this time.

Hope you have a great week!

Alec