Happy New Year From Ukraine!

Christmas & New Year's in Ukraine.

New Year is pretty big here, but from what I've heard, more and more people are making Christmas a bigger holiday, and more and more people are celebrating Christmas on the 25th, too. It's just another part of them trying to be as westernized as possible and as removed from Russia as possible.

Alec continues a Martschenko Christmas tradition.

But, we didn't do too much on New Years, mostly just sat around and ate a ton of food. We played a long game of a Ukrainian version of Monopoly (where the Ukrainian railway company is worth more lol) which I won and a few games of Bananagrams, which I also won. We also had a puzzle we worked on to fill the time a bit.

I also made some pretty tasty roast beef and mashed potatoes. I wanted to make some pumpkin pie, too, but I didn't have anything to actually cook the pie in, so that will have to wait. Sounds like ya'll had a fun New Years too with some pretty good food, as well.

Anyway, the big thing from this past week was Mission Conference in L'viv. The Christmas one is always the biggest one of the year, so it was pretty funny when they realized on Tuesday that no one had bought train tickets for anyone to make it into L'viv. When the old senior couple went home, it somehow just got forgotten lol. It all worked out ok in the end. Some people had to come a day early and some people got home later or had to take really long buses, but everyone made it there ok. That's why there were so many credit card transactions, I was trying to get tickets for all the missionaries in my zone lol.

But, everyone made it to L'viv, we had a great conference on Thursday, and then, just like last year, we all went to the city center and sang under the big Christmas tree.

Caroling in city center.

After that, we went into the opera house, where we had front row seats (which cost like $10 lol) to a Christmas concert. It was mostly weird old orthodox songs that I've never heard before, but there was one part where they tried singing some more familiar songs, some of them in English even. The best was when they tried to sing Jingle Bells - "dzhingel all ze vay." They also did not seem to care at all if they actually sang the right words in English, they would kind of just mumble through it and hope no one noticed. I guess they weren't counting on 35 Americans sitting in the front row. I think I attached some videos of it, idk if you can hear or not though.

Alec & his companions at the opera house in L'viv for a Christmas concert.

Other than that the big highlight of L'viv was going to a famous rib place. We heard a lot about it so we decided to give it a shot. It's only 4 dollars for a whole rack, so of course we got two racks each. They were pretty dang good for only 4 dollars, but two racks of ribs is way too many ribs. I attached some pics of the place and how they cook the ribs. Probably gonna go back there tomorrow again when I'm in L'viv for MLC. You can't beat $4 for a rack or ribs.

Mmmm . . . ribs.

The rest of the week was spent planning for MLC, going to church (btw, we're going back to the three hour block in this branch in 2018), and making failed attempts to visit inactive members that live super far away.

I attached a bunch of pics from this week and from last cause I don't remember if I sent any last week. I ain't got time to look through them so go ahead and pick out the bad ones.

Happy New Year!

Hope you had a great week!

Alec​