WEEK 46

I've pet so many cute dogs this week and I have pictures of none of them!

TUESDAY 30 MAY
We went to see a member this morning and we tried to talk to her about Joseph Smith a little bit because we found her teaching record and apparently the elders that taught her didn't do a very good job at teaching ANYTHING so we just wanted to review a little bit with her and it ended up with her explaining to us that literally every single church is exactly the same and that's why she goes to the Orthodox church now. It was an interesting visit. The only other really notable thing from Tuesday was English class and as always, I literally will never ever be a teacher because I hate it. It's fun sometimes but our students refuse to push themselves. They're like "we need more conversation!" and then if you literally ask them to say one thing in English they're like "No, stop, what are you doing? I can't speak English. You can't expect this from me why are you asking me to do this" and I'm just like OH MY, TEN MONTHS AGO I DIDN'T SPEAK ROMANIAN AT ALL AND NOW I DO, SO LIKE Y'ALL HAVE BEEN LEARNING ENGLISH FOR YOUR WHOLE LIVES, WHYYYY? But it's fine. I'm learning patience. Ah.

WEDNESDAY 31 MAY
Wednesday morning we had scheduled to go district contacting but because of a long story with exchanges it ended up being ZONE contacting. It was mostly a giant waste of time BUT we did end up meeting a super cute girl named Mihaela who's in law school right now so that was cool. Then we went to visit a member and we had given her a family history pamphlet in the past and she literally hasn't even written her name in it. We were like yo you can just write your name and your parents' names and that's a great first step but she still hasn't even written her name. Oh well. We met with a member named Mirela and read from the Book of Mormon in English because she wants to learn English. On our way home I was legit inspired to go to Carrefour to buy ice cream. Because we got to the ice cream aisle and guess what I found. BEN AND JERRY'S. APPARENTLY THAT EXISTS HERE. Y'all have to understand that ice cream here and desserts in general really aren't that great so I was in shock. They didn't have the one with Stephen Colbert's face on it (I think it's called Americone Dream??) buuuut they had chocolate fudge brownie and cookie dough and half baked and it was basically the best day of my life. Sora Nowjack and I bought three of them.

THURSDAY 1 JUNE
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY BABY BROTHER. We had to leave our apartment at around 7:30 on Thursday because we were meeting with an investigator named Bianca for breakfast with PRESIDENT IVORY. It was great except we went to the wrong restaurant at first... oops. I had eggs benedict with salmon and it was suuuper good and President Ivory ordered a fruit tray for the table. The restaurant had iPads for menus. A little ridiculous but cool. President Ivory is the best missionary ever. He talked to Bianca about her potential and how much the church could bless her and got her thinking about going on a mission and all that good stuff and then after he left we talked to her about baptism and she said that after she learns everything we have to teach, she'll totally get baptized because she just feels so good when she's at church or with missionaries or reading the book. It was awesome. #thankspres. After Bianca we went wayyyy out la tara to help a member in her garden. Sora Albu fed us sarmale and mamaliga and then we pulled weeds and picked strawberries for like two hours and she sent us home with a giant bucket of strawberries. It was fun. We got to wear pants :) and I got eaten alive by mosquitoes. Then we came home to change and get cleaned up a little bit and as soon as we got inside there was a huuuuuuge thunderstorm! It was great. I love thunder and lightning. After that we went to visit the Bogdan family. When we got home we made half our strawberries into jam (hey Mom aren't you impressed?) and then made some pie dough and IDK how to explain this but basically we made homemade poptarts. They were awesome.

FRIDAY 2 JUNE
We had district meeting at the office with the Otopeni elders and President Ivory. It was a good district meeting and we brought our poptarts to share. I can't believe I've turned into that sister missionary who bakes for district meeting but here I am... oh no. After that we went to lunch and then came back to the office to meet with a friend Diana. She's not super progressing right now. She's way more interested in the intellectual side of the church than the spiritual side but she's keeping commitments so we'll see what happens. Then we went to a bookstore to language study and we ran into the zone leaders on the way and ended up talking for a hot minute. On our way home we grabbed some cheap vanilla ice cream so we could use our leftover strawberry jam and have strawberry ice cream. It was pretty good. And it reminded me of home :)

SATURDAY 3 JUNE
A dude came to our house to change our lightbulbs and then we taught English. We lunched and limba studied and weekly planned and then headed to games night but the friend who said she'd come with us totally ditched out. We're supposed to bring someone if we go so that was kinda lame. Someone got really upset because I was "playing ping-pong wrong" and he was really not nice about it so that was fun. I was a little not nice back (after trying really hard to be polite!) so whoops. I guess I still have that fire in me after all. I thought the mission had mellowed me. Not quite ha. 

SUNDAY 4 JUNE
Church was fun. We taught YW and it was fun. I love our girls so much. They're hilarious and I just love em. Then after church the APs had organized a service project helping an old folks home move locations so we went up there and moved boxes and chairs and tables and stuff and I found the cutest puppy ever and someone got a picture but I think she forgot to send it to me so next week :( Then. Literally the dumbest thing in the world. So we have 2 phones right now because there's some complications with our text messaging so long story short we need two phones. The elders have one of the same phones as us. The elders broke their phone. We've been weening ourselves off phone #2 for a while so we were like eh we can switch sim cards and it'll all be good we don't need it. Until we get home and try to call someone and our supposedly working phone is now out of minutes as well as texts. Ahhhhh. But we had planned to call everyone from our area book to invite them to something. So we call them from the phone that has a busted screen. We literally can't see anything it's just busted. But if anyone ever calls us back on that phone we have no idea who it is so they're like hi you called? and we're like hi yeah probably but like who are you? and it's just very frustrating. Also we keep getting texts on that phone but we can't read them. So we could just switch the sims. except that 90% of our people call and text the other number so then we'd just be in the same situation. We need another phone. Elders. WHY do you throw your phones and not catch them and then sweet talk us into giving your our phone? Why did we do that? It was ridiculous.

MONDAY 5 JUNE
I think I wrote about this a while back but we found 90 lei in change in our apartment so today we decided to take Sora DeSpain (they're the office couple) out for papanasi! It's a Romanian dessert that's actually good. And we paid in all change.

The waitress haaaaaaaated us lol but it was a ton of fun and Sora DeSpain thought it was the best thing ever. Other than that we haven't done much today.

Sora Lucy Gleason
România/Moldova Mission
July 2016-January 2018