Weather Turning Colder

Alec aspires for immortality.

This past week was pretty eventful. We had a branch picnic in the park on Saturday and then on Monday we went to a city about two and a half hours away with a really sweet castle.

But, most of all this past week was pretty dang cold. It was still September and I already had to bring out my winter coat and everything. Last year was one of the coldest winters ever in Ukraine, and it's looking like this year will be even colder. So maybe some hand warmers would be a nice birthday present.

On Saturday, we had a big picnic with the branch. We made kan jam out of some buckets like I did in Uzhhorod, but I'm not totally sure that they really understood it. Ukrainians aren't exactly coordinated enough with a Frisbee to be any good at kan jam. We ended up just playing ultimate with the buckets as a goal, and that worked out ok. For food, we grilled some chicken drumsticks over an open fire. It was super good, just took a very long time. The coolest part was going with a member the day before to go buy all of the food. Usually we buy our own food at a supermarket cause it's a lot easier, but we went with him to the marketplace to buy it the real Ukrainian way. It was all pretty cool and easy, just the meat was probably a little bit unsanitary. It's probably a buck or two cheaper overall though, so you gotta do what you gotta do. A good amount of people came to the activity, most of them inactive members who only show up when there's free food, but I'd say it was still moderately successful. And there's a cool WWII monument at the park, so I also got a pic with that.

And then on Monday we had our big trip to Kamyanets-Podilskiy, a good sized city about two and a half hours away. We had to get special permission from the mission president to do it cause it's outside of 50 km, but he always lets missionaries visit it every couple of transfers cause it's such a cool place. You can probably look up the geography of it better than I can explain, but as far as I understand it's a city that's built on this big plateau that was formed from a horseshoe bend in a river, so it's a great place to build a fortified castle. You can see in some of the pictures how the river cut a big natural moat around the city. It's pretty neat and it made for some cool Lord of the Rings looking pictures​.

The castle at Kamyanets-Podilskiy.

The castle itself was pretty cool, but before we went there we stopped at a restaurant on the way. It was probably the most Ukrainian meal I've ever had: There was a castle in the background . . .

 I had very ukrainian borsch (beet soup) and salo (pig fat), and most of all, a stray dog, and later a cat, wandered into the restaurant halfway through looking for food. ​

But it was pretty tasty. And then after that we went to the castle. Pretty neat. I made my own Kamyanets-Podilskiy coin by hitting it with a hammer, so that's cool.

And then we had a l ttle bit of extra time so we wandered around the city looking around. It's definitely one of the nicer places I've ever been to in Ukraine. We saw a black swan at a restaurant, and then took some stairs down into the valley part to get some cool pics by the waterfall and under the bridge. Definitely pretty neat. So, yeah, lots of pics of that.

And then I also have a pic of some kvas in Ternopil. It's basically a soft drink, and most of the time it's super gross. But, for some reason the kvas in Ternopil is really good so I always get some when I go there.

Alec in Ternopil.

Yeah, that's about it for this week. We haven't watched General Conference, yet, cause we'd be watching it in the middle of the night if we wanted to watch it live. But, we'll be doing that this weekend with the branch. We have computers in this church, so I'll probably be able to watch it in English this time.

Hope you have a great week!

Alec