"A Little Bit About Uzhhorod"

Yup, I got transferred last Wednesday. All together, it was about 9 hours on a train from Rivne to Uzhhorod (also spelled Uzhgorod). Luckily for the last six we had a private coupe with beds and everything. And lots of the ride was through the Carpathians so there was plenty of stuff to look at. I attached some pictures and videos of the view from the train ride.

30 seconds of Alec's 9-hour train ride

Riding through the Carpathians

Alec's trusty hammock at the Tunnel of Love in Rivne

I also attached a couple pictures from my last couple days in Rivne. For P-day we went back to the Tunnel of Love, cause Sister Morris was being transferred out and she hadn't been there yet. It hadn't bloomed yet so it wasn't super nice, and there wasn't snow or anything, so basically it was pretty ugly -- but still cool enough to take pictures. 

Right after that, we had to rush home to help a member. We talked to her on the phone and we thought she wanted help moving a desk from her apartment to her office. Apparently we misheard. When we got there, she had a giant 10 foot cactus for us to move. So we had to carry a huge cactus halfway across the town to her office. So that was fun. 

After that, we went to a member's house for a family night. He's super cool and he knows English pretty decent so it's easy going over to him. He also makes really good pizza. 

Family and homemade pizza night at a local member's home

Alec says goodbye to his companion in Rivne and boards train to Uzhhorod

I left Wednesday morning pretty early (here's a pic of me with my old companion). And then got on the train to L'viv alone. When I got there I met up with Elder Volkov, who was also coming to Uzhorrod. He's from Donetsk (which I'm pretty sure might be part of Russia now, depending on who you ask,) so he just speaks pure Russian. He was supposed to be going to England, but so far he hasn't gotten his visa, so he's here with us. The train ride was pretty uneventful, except we did have to translate for border control for this poor Libyan guy who didn't have his passport and we had to tell him he had to get off the train. A little bit later we arrived in Uzhorrod.

Uzhhorod with the river Uzh flowing through it

A little bit about Uzhhorod: It's definitely much prettier than Rivne. Some parts look pretty ugly and communistic, but a good half of the city looks very cool and old European. There's a huge river (called the Uzh) that runs right down the middle of the city. In a couple weeks, the cherry blossoms should be blooming, and apparently this becomes a huge tourist destination cause it's so pretty. The mountains around here aren't super big, but if you get a good vantage point you can definitely see some cool mountains. Our apartment is actually very nice (and we even have hot water this time--except we did have our apartment partly flooded this morning when we came back from the grocery store, not sure why but I think we got it figured out) so that's nice. Unfortunately, there are almost no buses here cause it's kind of a smaller city so we end up walking most of the place, usually a couple hours a

day just spent walking around. We are very close to the border- -- our apartment is about a 20-minute

View of the Carpathian Mountains

walk from Slovakia, and maybe a 30-minute bus ride to Hungary. Because of that, the languages here get kind of jumbled. We have one family we started teaching -- he pretty much just speaks Russian and his wife only speaks Hungarian, so things get kind of tough. From what I've noticed so far it's about a 50/50 split between Russian and Ukrainian here, so things might get a little difficult. There's also a ton of gypsies here -- it's like the gypsy capital of Ukraine, so it's nice seeing more dark-skinned people for once. We're actually teaching two different gypsy families right now, one of them is actually named Alec! I didn't believe it when I first heard it and I assumed his name was Oleg, but it's actually Alec.

The church here is very small -- on Sunday we had four people at church (I'm hoping that was mostly cause people forgot about daylight savings.) There are some strong members, and then some that are not so strong, but for the most part the members we do have are great. Basically the way it works here is that the missionaries do everything here. At least two of the four of us are pretty much expected to talk every Sunday, and we lead most of the classes and stuff like that too. It's definitely a lot of work, but it's interesting for sure. 

Uzhhorod Castle

We were planning on going to see a castle today, but since our water heater was leaking everywhere, we're going to meet up with our landlord today to get it figured out so we'll have to go to the castle next week. Hope everything is gong great back home!

Alec