Ostrich Eggs, Potty Humor & Attempted Bribes

Last look at Uzhhorod, then off to Khmelnitskiy.

This last week was pretty crazy actually. So you know I got transferred out of Uzhhorod to Khmelnitskiy. I'm here now, but it wasn't a totally smooth transfer. I was supposed to be leaving Uzh early Wednesday morning, but that didn't happen. We spent lots of Monday and Tuesday at some gov administration buildings (kinda like the DMV but wayyy slower) trying to get my posvidka, basically like a visa thing that proves I'm here legally. I was supposed to be getting a new one, but they messed something up and so it wasn't quite ready yet (even though they'd been working on it for a month and a half) and I couldn't leave the city without getting it. Otherwise I'd have to come back in a few days to pick it up--and the trip from Uzhhorod to Khmelnitskiy is the longest possible trip in the whole mission. So I ended up staying in Uzhhorod til early Friday morning. It was actually pretty cool, I was able to visit a few people and say goodbye to more people and have a bit more time to pack and get ready to go, so I'm pretty glad it ended up working out that way.
 I left Uzhhorod early Friday morning at 5 am on a six-hour, very uncomfortable train to L'viv. From there I had to just chill in the mission office for a few hours and wait for my train to Khmenlnistky in the afternoon. So it was about 6 hours to L'viv, and then another 4ish hours to Khmenlntskyymnitissky, but the second train was wayyyyy nicer. by far the nicest train I've seen in Ukraine. I was second class, but it still felt like I was on an airplane. They even had air conditioning and trash cans. pretty fancy.
 
I got in Friday night, went to English practice, and then I've been here ever since. The apartment here is decently nice, but none of the apartments in the whole mission are as good as the ones in Uzhhorod. The nice thing is that we're now only a 2 minute walk from the church, as opposed to 35 minutes in Uzhhorod. The branch is the second smallest one in the mission, right behind Uzhhorod. this past Sunday we actually had less people at church than we usually had in Uzhhorod. So not much has changed, but I think there's a lot of friendship and unity here, so at least there's that.

The coolest part is that I'll be spending about two days a week in Ternopil, a neighboring city a couple hours away that just opened for missionary work. So far, we're just going there in normal clothes without name tags, cause I don't think all the paperwork is completed just yet. And pretty much all we're doing there is English practice, so I'll be teaching English three times a week, which should be a lot of fun. 

OK a few stories from last week, most of them have pictures going with them:

"We bought an ostrich egg."

 We bought an ostrich egg. They sold them at the store we shopped at in Uzhhorod and it was my last time. I don't know how much they cost in America, but $12 seemed like a pretty good deal. I wasn't sure what to do with it, so we just cracked it into a big pan and tried to make a giant fried egg. Obviously, it didn't work really well. I mean it cooked all the way through (especially after I flipped it--see the video), but It just had a really weird texture. It tasted like normal egg, but I could not eat very much of it. The shell was also super hard to crack, I basically had to cut it with a bread knife. and a member (the one in the blueish dress with the red curtain behind) got mad at us for ruining the egg shell, Apparently you're supposed to keep them. Oops.

 
There's a few pictures of some members I visited during my last week in Uzhhorod. 

Alec with some of the members in Uzhhorod

And some more members

And some pictures from the week before that I got from my companion's camera from a castle in a town near Uzhhorod . . .

At a castle near Uzhhorod

And another one by the castle

 Including some Putin toilet paper . . .

Hmmm.

There's a pic of me in front of a ФАРТ store, which is pronounced "fart." Apparently it means "luck" in Russian.

Why is Alec laughing?

And there's some landscapes from the train ride from L'viv to Khmelntinsktiskmtslitiskskiy.

Ukrainian countryside . . .

. . . on the road to Khmelnitskiy.

 There's also a long video from my last game night in Uzhhorod, I'm not really sure what's there, but one of our English-goers took my camera and took the video, so have fun.
 And today was actually probably one of the craziest events of my mission. So, we were sitting here just starting to email and we get a call from this recently inactive member. He asks us to meet him at the marketplace. He's a somewhat special-needs 20-year-old kid and he's been having a lot of problems lately, so we always try to drop everything and help him out with whatever he needs. So, of course, we went right away to meet him. We get to the marketplace and it's completely empty. Apparently it's closed on Mondays, so that was kinda sketch in the first place. This is also the 3rd biggest marketplace (called a rynok) in all of Ukraine, so we had a very hard time finding him. After half an hour, we found the place he wanted us to meet him, but he wasn't there. We called him and he said to look for these guys in purple shirts. A few minutes later, a couple big guys walk out and show us the way. They kinda lead us back behind a building and this member is sitting in this super sketch old communist trailer thing, with four big guys in camouflage blocking the exit and smoking cigarettes. Supposedly, the kid was breaking into storage rooms at the marketplace and trying to steal stuff, although he claims he was just looking for a bathroom. And so, this was the security of this marketplace that apprehended him.

One guy looks at me and tells us we have two options: (1) He'll call his "boss" who will come down and do something that didn't sound super good (I couldn't really understand his Russian very well) or (2) We give them 1000 hryven and they let the kid go.

So, basically, I ended up telling him we weren't gonna pay anything. (Mission rles.) After the boss came they let the kid go and we walked away with him. I'm not exactly sure what happened, I was on the phone with the mission president at this point. We didn't really ask any questions, we just left as quick as possible. So, yeah, it was pretty sketch, but don't worry it wasn't really a dangerous situation, just a pretty cool story to tell that I had some Ukrainian security guards try to extort $30 from me.

Hope y'all have a great week!

Alec