The 4am Knock on the Door

We had a pretty eventful week over here in the good old Ukraine. It all started off early Tuesday morning. Like 4:00 in the morning. I was awaken by someone knocking on our door. At first I just ignored it, figuring it was just some drunk person wandering through our apartment building, but then a couple minutes later they knocked again, so I decided to at least look through the peephole and see what was going on. Ukrainians really love their doors, so for some reason we have two, one right after the other. Well when I opened the first one I immediately got a strong whiff of smoke. 

So I was like, oh boy, I think our building is on fire. So I woke my companion up, put a jacket on, and we grabbed a couple important things like passports and stuff like that. We opened the second door and the entire stairwell was just full of smoke. So we grabbed some towels to cover our mouths and started making our way down from the sixth floor. We didn't see any flames, but as we made it down to the first floor we saw firefighters with the full gas mask outfits and everything pulling fire hoses up the stairwell. So, yeah, we made it out onto the street and there's like 3 firetrucks and an ambulance and a bunch of cops and everything (most of them just standing around watching.) And then after an hour or so all the firefighters started to leave, and so we decided it was ok to go back in.

Basically what happened is that something in the basement caught fire. I guess they put the actual fire out pretty quickly, but even today our building still smells like smoke. The weirdest part of it all was the fact that there were only maybe 20 or so people out on the street when we got there. There's probably close to 1,000 people who live in that building. There's no fire alarms or anything in the buildings, so some people might have just slept through it, but there were also tons of people just out looking from their balconies. It's super, super weird how people knew that their building was on fire, but for some reason they decided to just stay in their apartments. And the truth is we could have slept through the entire thing and had no idea. We would have just woken up and figured that one of our neighbors had been smoking in the building or something like that. So yeah it was a pretty wild morning. I have some real dark pictures that you can't see much from, but you can kind of see people just chilling in the balcony while their building is on fire, lol.

OK, and then after all that, for our activity night on Tuesday, we thought it would be a great idea to start another fire and do a little marshmallow roasting outside the church building. The Ukrainians actually really liked it, haha. We also played spikeball and four square and threw a football around. 

And then the next couple days were spent in L'viv for a mission conference. Going to L'viv is always fun, and I finally went to one of the famous restaurants there called Kryivka. It's theoretically supposed to be a secret. There's no signs or anything and it's just at an unmarked door. You knock on the door, say the secret password ("glory to Ukraine"), and then they let you in, give you a free shot (we kindly refused) and then they take you downstairs into what looks like a war bunker. It's a Ukrainian nationalist restaurant, basically, only purely Ukrainian dishes and pure Ukrainian language. As you leave you go through this war-zone decorated tunnel and out through the gift shop. They have a big transformer looking thing and  a tower you can climb up with a big turret on top. It honestly felt like I was at Disneyworld. It was fun, but, tbh, the food wasn't all that good. 

Then we took a late bus back to Lutsk and met a cool guy who just got back from visiting his girlfriend in the Netherlands. Apparently he just speaks English with her, and honestly his English was not all that good. Crazy how people have relationships like that with such big language barriers.

On Friday we did Helping Hands and cleaned up in a park here. Lots of nasty stuff but it looked a lot better afterward. It was super interesting actually, I guess Friday and Saturday were just like the general spring cleaning days for the entire city. As we were walking around we would just see tons of people walking around with trash bags and gloves and stuff just picking up trash. And after the snow melts there is a ton of trash. But it all looks a lot better and it's cool to see the entire city come together to make things look a little nicer. 

And then on Saturday we helped out at an English school. One of the students walked in and I knew I recognized him, but I couldn't tell where from. Eventually I realized that he was the kid a couple weeks ago during our big Easter activity in downtown who walked up and asked to see our permit for being there on the street. He had told us that us talking about religion "cuts him deep to his soul" and then it was super offensive for us to be here. I told him I didn't really have to show him any permit cause he didn't really have any authority to ask for it, and that he was welcome to keep walking on his way. He kinda started arguing and I didn't want to make a scene, so I kinda flashed him the permit. We actually did have one (literally the first time on my entire mission I've gotten a permit for something like that) and he walked away kind of upset. So when he showed up to the English thing, I thought it was pretty hilarious. He was actually a nice kid there, so hopefully we'll be able to help him change his mind a bit about religion.

Oh and right after that we stopped by a recital one of the young men from the branch was doing. I think I have a video of it.

And finally on Sunday we spent half the day trying to figure out financial stuff with the branch. MLS is a pretty complicated program and NO ONE here knows how to use it. I feel like I've spent half my Sundays on my mission in the clerk's office trying to figure this stuff out, always fun stuff. 

That's about it for this past week, I think. I'll attach a few pics. They're kind of all jumbled up, sorry and good luck. Oh also we went to the castle again last p-day. Today we're planning on going to the zoo, so I should have some more pics for ya next week. Oh and also Sunday evening we took a walk through the park with our friend/investigator. lots of super sketch carnival rides and stuff. I won't tell you when I ride them.

Have a good week!​

Alec