One Year Down, One To Go

Alec celebrates one year with a well-deserved steak dinner.

So last Thursday was the one year mark. Pretty crazy that I've already been out here one year. Also pretty crazy that I've only been out here one year. Time goes super fast and super slow at the same time. I'd say I've probably grown quite a bit over the past year, but I'd also say I have a lot more growing and learning left to do. 

One year down, one to go.

It's weird being out for a year, and it definitely feels like a bit of a turning point. It's like the point where you start counting down instead of counting up. There's definitely still a lot to learn. I mean I know a lot more than I did a year ago, about the gospel and about Ukrainian and about people and about coooking and all that stuff. Definitely gonna contineu to learn throughout the entire mission, though. You never really stop learning, if you do that's pretty bad. I wouldn't say that I feel too different than I did a year ago, but I'm sure I am. Most of the changes are very gradual, so it's hard to notice them when they happen.

We tried a couple different things to celebrate this week, and only one of them really worked out. The actual year mark was on Thursday. We spent the entire morning (and most of Tuesday morning) waiting at the equivalent of the Ukrainian DMV to do registration stuff, and then the other elders, including Elder Hill who entered the MTC the same time as me, had to go to Ternopil, so we decided to wait until the next day to go out to dinner to celebrate. 

Desperate for homemade cookies.

I did, however, finally use the brown sugar y'all sent to try to make some cookies for Thursday. I don't know what happened, but something didn't work quite right. The dough didn't have quite the right consistency and it was more like bread dough than cookie dough. I don't know if you have any suggestions on what to do next time, cause I'm not totally sure what happened. It might have been the fact that I didn't have an electronic mixer, so I had to do it by hand. Or maybe there just wasn't enough flour, but I ended up with a total of over 3 cups of flour, so I don't know how much more you can really add. 

Anyway, they actually turned out to taste pretty good. Probably cause I haven't had any cookies with brown sugar in a year. But the texture was definitely way off. 

Celebrating a year at the local steakhouse.

Our second attempt at celebrating went better. On Friday we went to a restaurant called "Beef and Cake." I figured it was a pretty big occasion so I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu, the t-bone steak. It ended up costing about $22 and for $22 it was a pretty decent steak. The pictures don't look super great but it was actually pretty tasty. And the burned corn was not bad either. I was a little salty that they cut it up before they brought it to me (isn't that like the #1 thing to not do with steak?) and they cooked it medium instead of medium rare like I ordered, but it was still pretty good. 

The other highlight of the week was when we were sitting in a restaurant and Taylor Swift's new music video showed up. I was pretty excited to watch it, but tbh I was not very impressed. I don't know, I just didn't like the actual song all that much. I heard the other one she released was better, so I'll have to chill in some more restaurants until I see it.

We had some interesting people at church. A member came who was born in L'viv and lived in America for the last 20 years. He is here on some military assignment for a couple weeks. He told me that the per diem for American military on assignment in Ukraine is $93. That's so insane. That's almost as much as we get a month. You would have a seriously difficult time spending 93 dollars a day here. And then there was also a member here yesterday named Sasha. He works on cruise ships and he brought his Guatamalan girlfriend, who was pretty nice. Neither of them really know English that fantastic, so I wonder how that works out. But, yeah there was a lot of English speaking at church yesterday.

One other story, we were standing out in the center of the city with a table with a bunch of Books of Mormon and stuff. And this old drunk guy has been talking to us for like 20 minutes (a pretty regular occurence) and then the police show up and escort him to their car cause apparently he's been bothering people all day in center. So that was fun.

Hope y'all have a great week!

Alec