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