Personal Days & Other Random Stuff

Today is the last p-day before the sisters in our district go home, so in about an hour we're going to a chocolate restaurant and then coming back to the church to play games with them. And then tonight a family in the branch (the same family that invited us over on Christmas Eve) is having us over for dinner for the sister's last p-day. We were supposed to bring a salad and a dessert, so we made a delicious apple crisp and then a super, super disgusting salad. They don't really have lettuce here, especially in the wintertime, so you have to be creative. We found a recipe for a carrot and raisin and pineapple salad with a mayonnaise dressing. so we made it. and it's pretty nasty.  Oh well, I'm sure the apple crisp will be good.

Sunday was the same as normal, I spent about 12 hours at the church meeting with people and doing tithing and stuff like that. I also gave a talk in sacrament meeting (for the second time since I got here) so that was fun. I'm never sure if people actually understand me when I speak Ukrainian, but I asked a few people after and they said they understood just fine, so that was good to hear. 

We get to do many of the same things every day. We talk to people on the streets and give out books and stuff like that. I don't know if you heard, but the church changed the missionary schedule last week in a worldwide missionary broadcast. Before, we would wake up at 6:30, exercise for 30 minutes, and then eat breakfast and get ready for the day. Then there would be 3 hours of studying, and we'd usually eat lunch and then leave the apartment and be back by 9:00pm. Now we do 2 hours of studying in the morning, leave the apartment for a while and go talk to people, and then come back and have lunch and then do the last hour of study afterward. The church also shortened lunch to half an hour instead of an hour, but now we're supposed to be back in the apartments by 8:30, so we end the day half an hour earlier. The best news though is that the church removed studies on p-day, so we have a lot more time to get personal stuff done.

Speaking of p-day, we went bowling last week. It was kinda weird, cause it was a bowling alley that looked just like America and it didn't feel like being in Ukraine at all.

Even though I was wearing a shirt and tie, I still bowled one of the best games I've ever bowled. 

The guy who was baptized last week was an older gentlemen. Baptisms rarely happen here, but those that do happen are typically older folks for sure. He's a super, great guy though and is very excited about family history work.

We don't really eat a lot of the Ukrainian food. We make most of our food, usually just something with chicken or sausage and also a ton of fruit cause it's so cheap. You can get a kilo of clementines for about a dollar, so we eat a lot of those. 

If you haven't sent the box yet and still want ideas, American food items are always appreciated. Specifically peanut butter, and maybe vanilla and brown sugar (they don't have those here) so I can make some cookies. Also a specific request, if you can find them: they don't have many good pens here so some "Pilot G-2 0.38" pens would be sweet. 

We went to visit a member last Monday night and he showed us a cool lookout point where you can see over the whole city. So I had to go back in the day to get a picture. I promise it looks a little bit cooler in person.

I also saw an advertisement on a window today, see if you can tell why it's so cool.

Hope everything is going great and I miss y'all.

Alec

Our First Baptism

Alec's First Baptism

We had our baptism on Saturday, so preparing for that has been what we've been doing for most of the past week. I attached a couple pictures from the baptism. He's a super nice old guy and he's super excited about the whole thing. We've been teaching him for about a month and a half now and he was very ready. It was pretty cool to see all that. The Mission President and his wife were here for this weekend so luckily everything went pretty well for the baptism and the confirmation on Sunday. Lots of our time this past week was spent printing out programs and buying food and cleaning the church and making sure the baptismal font worked (I was pretty surprised there was actually enough warm water!) 

Ukrainian McDonald's

On Wednesday I spent a lot of the day registering to live here in Rivne. I already registered in Ivano-Frankivsk, but now I had to register here. I guess I've technically been here illegally since the new year...oops. It was a bit of walking around and sitting in government buildings waiting for my number to be called, but I think I'm totally legal now. The guy in charge of registering missionaries is a member from Ivano-Frankivsk and he really loves McDonalds. Since there's only one in Rivne and L'viv, he always brings his kids with him to go to the McDonald's (lol) so I tried out Ukrainian McDonald's for the first time and... it tasted exactly like American McDonald's. I've heard that Ukrainian McDonald's is worse than the rest of Europe, which means it's about as good as it is in America. 

Orthodox Church in Rivne

There was a holiday this past week too (there's like 20 different holidays in the month of January.) I don't know exactly what it was, but it's something to do with the baptism of Jesus Christ. So everyone takes water bottles to the churches and gets a bottle full of holy water to drink. Not exactly sure the symbolism and everything behind it, but I got a couple pictures by the big orthodox church in the center of town and some people filling their water bottles. 

I don't have any pictures now, but last Monday we went to the house of a couple investigators for dinner. It was fun and interesting. They gave us холодець which is meat jello. It's jello made out of broth with chunks of meat floating in it. This particular meat was tongue. It's definitely one of the most "interesting" things I've ever eaten. We also had some dried fish. 

The apple juice was good. 

Love,

Alec

Trip To Tунель Kохання

We got about 8 or 9 inches of snow here last week and the city was just as busy as always. If it makes you feel any better though, every kid in the whole country has been out of school for the past two months or so because of a flu quarantine or something like that, so they like to cancel school here too, it's not just in NC.

Alec at тунель кохання

Last Monday we decided to take a little trip to a village outside of Rivne (that's why I emailed earlier). There's a place called тунель кохання (Tunnel of Love) and we went to go have a bonfire and take some pictures. It's pretty cool. The pictures I took don't do it justice, but if you google it you'll find some pretty cool pictures. It's like pinterest famous or something. It was pretty cool to see with all the snow and everything. We also met a couple people from Reunion Island. It's a tiny French island off the coast of Madagascar. They spoke decent English so we invited them to hang out with us at our bonfire. They were in the middle of a two-year trip around the entire world, and I think they were pretty surprised to see Americans in the middle of Ukraine. They definitely weren't at all prepared for the cold though, it was probably about 10 F, so they were grateful to take some of our hot chocolate and we gave them some handwarmers (which apparently don't exist outside of America cause no one has even heard of them). One of them was super into music so he asked us to sing a hymn with him. I have a video of it but it's taking forever to upload so maybe I'll send it another time. I did attach some pictures of the whole trip, including a picture of a wild dog that followed us for about a mile. There are TONS of wild dogs here for some reason. 

Sharing a bonfire and hot chocolate with tourists from Reunion Island

The wild dogs of Ukraine

We had an interesting experience on Wednesday. There was this kid (about 22 years old) that had come to the church a few times, so we were talking with him a bit. He was a super nice kid and everything. When we said we were about to leave the church, he said he'd come with us. He said he had to go to the bathroom, but then he just kind of disappeared. We didn't really think much of it and left, but a couple hours later a member asked us if we had seen his phone, which apparently he had left at the church. Well turns out the kid had stolen the phone and just left the church building. I felt super super super bad, especially cause it was actually a pretty nice phone, and electronics are very, very expensive here. And to make it worse, he had a bunch of pictures of his 2-year-old son on the phone. He asked us to help him find the phone and/or the kid. We were gonna go check out some pawn shops, but we decided to go check out an internet club that we knew the kid liked to hang out. We went there and looked around but didn't see him. While we were talking to the lady at the front desk, we heard footsteps and the front door slam. Somehow he snuck past us and was running away. Well the member started booking it after him. It turned into a high-speed chase through the back alleys of Ukraine. It only lasted about 15 seconds, but it was still pretty sweet. He did end up catching the kid and getting his phone back, which was a pretty big relief because I felt pretty terrible about the whole thing. (This guy was the member who invited us over on Ukrainian Christmas Eve, so I definitely didn't want to make him hate us for losing his phone.

Banana bread in a frying pan

We made the banana bread recipe you sent the other day. I attached a picture. We don't have bread pans, so we just put it in a frying pan in the oven. It actually turned out pretty well. I want to try to make the chicken pot pie, but you can't buy Pillsbury pie crusts here (lol), so I'll have to figure out how to make that from scratch. 

The jacket I bought here seems to be holding up just fine through all the freezing weather, even though it was only $60. I lost one of my gloves a couple weeks ago, so I went to the renok (farmer's market) in the center of town and bought a nice pair of leather gloves (~$12) and those have been super great to have. As long as I'm smart and layer up it's usually not so cold. Except for my toes. no matter how many pairs of socks I put on, my toes always get cold.

Our first baptism should be happening this weekend. The investigator is super excited about it. We'll be pretty busy getting stuff ready for that this week. Baptisms don't happen very often here. It's the first one in well over a year in Rivne, so the whole branch is pretty excited about it.   

Hope you have a good week!

Alec

The Actual Ukrainian Christmas

It's been pretty chilly here. One night it was forecasted to get down to about -20 F. Not sure if it ever did (I was asleep and definitely not outside,) but we spent a fair amount of time outside when it was well below zero. I was talking to someone and he said (if I understood him right, I probably didn't) that it hasn't been this cold in Ukraine in like 20 years. And the hard part is that it really doesn't warm up very much. We spend a lot of time outside talking to people and just walking everywhere, so it gets pretty chilly. After a certain point though your face just kind of goes numb so any temperature below zero pretty much just feels the same. My water bottle always freezes, and my companion actually had a tear freeze to his face while we were walking across a bridge once. So, yeah, it's a little cold. There actually was hardly any snow until yesterday - there's probably about four inches now. 

This past week we actually did a few different things. On Monday night, a member of the church invited us over to his house for dinner. He had us stop by a store on the way and pick up a chicken. After drinking some chunky carrot juice and two glasses of tomato juice (I really don't like tomatoes) he started cooking the chicken. He's a doctor here in Ukraine, and for being a doctor he seemed very unconcerned about salmonella poisoning. Either way the chicken was fully cooked (after like an hour and a half) and it was actually super tasty. While we were there, we tried playing a card game with him (called Saboteur, idk if you've heard of it) and I don't really think he understood the rules. Either way it was still fun and the chicken was good so all was well.

On Thursday night all of the missionaries decided to go caroling to a few of the church members around town. It was super, super cold, probably about -5, but still pretty fun. I think a lot of the people really appreciated it. Lots of them tried to give us money (apparently tons of people go caroling and then ask for money here, so everyone was surprised when we told them it was free) and one grandma even gave us some dinner, which was great cause I hadn't eaten yet. 

On Friday night (Christmas Eve in Ukraine) a member invited all of the missionaries over to their apartment for a little Christmas party. It's a super cool couple with a very cute two-year old son, so it was a lot of fun. We were actually supposed to have English practice that night, but it was a holiday and it was freezing cold outside, so we just decided to cancel it because no one was going to come. So we all go over to their apartment and she's prepared a huge Ukrainian meal for us with all kinds of stuff (most of it was pretty good, some of it - like the pieces of bread with dried anchovies and a lemon slice - were not my favorite). We just hung out there and talked to the family for a little bit, and with all six of the missionaries, it was pretty entertaining. 

On Christmas night we went caroling again to some other members. It was very fun again and I think a lot of the families really, really appreciated it. I'm getting pretty good at singing Christmas hymns in Ukrainian. 

Right now we have one investigator rand he's getting baptized on the 21st. He seems pretty excited about it, so hopefully it works out. He lives about a 30-minute bus ride from Rivne so we've started just meeting with him over Skype, which seems to work surprisingly well, and it's much easier than having him come here or us go there. 

And then on Sunday the branch did like a little lunch after church.

Finally, here's a video, you can't see much, but it was cold enough to do the thing where you throw boiling water out the window and it creates a lot of fog. So here's a pretty bad video of that. I was getting frustrated with people's misunderstanding of basic phase changes.

Love you guys!

Alec

New Year's In Ukraine

Honestly, I can't really say what New Year's is truly like here. It's basically their Christmas, so people get presents and everything just like we do for Christmas. I don't actually know what the celebrations look like though, because we were in our apartments at 4:00 on New Year's Eve and weren't supposed to leave at all the next day, except to go to our one hour of church. That one hour turned into about six hours because we were helping people with family history and other stuff. All the missionaries make a big deal about people getting drunk and it being super dangerous out on the streets. I guess they've never been to Franklin Street after a UNC win. When we were outside the streets were totally empty. But, I'm not complaining because we went to the other missionaries' apartment and made tacos and played games there for the whole day, so it was pretty relaxing.

I walk past the movie theater almost every day and they have huge posters for all the movies. So, I've seen the posters for Star Wars and Harry Potter and all the other movies that have come out recently (in Ukrainian/Russian, of course.) And I've seen movie posters for the new Disney movie here in Rivne.

Earlier in the week I made my trip back to Ivano-Frankivsk to get some paperwork done. Luckily, we didn't have to take the nine-hour bus ride this time, but we did have to take three different trains in one day. We left Rivne at six in the morning on a train to L'viv. About an hour later we took another train to Ivano, and then about four hours later we took yet another train back to L'viv, where we spent the night. So it was still about nine hours of train riding, but for six of those hours we were in private coupes with a couple beds, so we just got to nap for a few hours. That was super nice. And then we woke up in L'viv and took one last train back to Rivne. All of that traveling so I could sign one piece of paper. Hopefully that finishes all of the paperwork for now.

It was also good because when I went through L'viv we stopped by the mission office and my package was there. I don't know if it had come earlier, but I was able to bring it and open it up. Thank you very much for all the gifts and cards and stuff. I really appreciate it. The peanut butter is going to be great and all of those dip mixes and stuff will be fantastic. The camera you sent is definitely miles better than the one I had before, thank you very much. I have some pictures I've taken with it.

We went out to dinner as a district on Friday, so here's a picture of that.

Here's a picture of a pretty sweet piece of art by our apartment. Look closely and see if you can see if you can guess what it was originally. I think it's pretty interesting.

Look closely at the picture of art at the top left. There's an old hammer and sickle that was painted over, so you can tell it used to be some Soviet art, but when Ukraine got their independence I guess they painted over it.

For P-day we went shopping at a Second Hand store. I don't know if I've told you about them before, but they're like big good-will stores, but instead of having prices for each individual item, you just go in and pay by the kilogram. Depending on the day, you can get clothes for about $1.50/kilogram, so you can definitely find some sweet deals. What we did today is we all drew names out of a hat and then we did kind of a Secret Santa for each other where we each had to buy some article of clothing for someone else. Sister S. got me a tiny little pink jersey, and I picked out a sweet colorful safari shirt for one of the elders.

It's been mostly above freezing the past week or so. Later on this week it's supposed to get to -20 Celsius for a few days. That sounds really, really bad, but that's only like 7 degrees Fahrenheit. It gets colder than that in North Carolina. Honestly it's really not that cold here (yet). I think the folks from Utah aren't used to the humidity, and that probably gives it such a bad rep.

It doesn't really feel like we're alone here. There's 20 or so decently active members, and there's a few that are just super, super active. So we can almost always find members willing to come on lessons with us and stuff, which is a huge help. I'm starting to get to know some of the members a little bit better, but it's pretty difficult when I can't speak the language. I think most of the kids like me at least, because I bring them candy every once in a while.

We have a couple investigators now with baptismal dates. One of them is super awesome and he comes to church and he read the Book of Mormon (for the second time) basically in one day. He should be getting baptized in a couple Saturdays if everything goes right. The other guy has been busy with family stuff with the holidays so we'll have to meet with him soon to see what's going on.

Let me explain this orangish sign. 

It says "Slava Ukraini" which means "Glory to Ukraine." I don't exactly know the history, but when people say "Glory to Ukraine" you're supposed to say "Glory to the Heroes" back. It's a patriotic slogan you see all over the place.

We get 30 minutes of exercise at 6:30 each morning, I'll usually wake up and do push-ups or something. When it warms up we'll probably go running or something like that. I'm usually more tired at the beginning of the day when I have to wake up early than I am at the end of the day. I guess I'm still on a college schedule. But, it's still not too hard to fall asleep at night.

I've got to head out, but I hope y'all had a great holiday season! I'm going to a member's house for dinner tonight, and last time we went to his house he gave us apple sauce and apple sauce tea. Talk to you next week!

Alec