You can make the sun shine!

Time got faster and I've lost the ability to discern between things people might actually want to hear and those you probably don't want to hear.

We got travel plans! Our flight out of here is at 12:00 Monday morning and we'll arrive in our mission Tuesday night. It's going to be fun, though, I've decided. I was so excited to re-pack (because then I have everything neat and in one place, yay!) but it's tricky when you have to leave out things for four days and honestly I don't have that many things. I just packed, weighed my bags, and unpacked, pretty much.

I really don't have much to say. We got someone who works at the MTC who we do service with around campus to let us into some more restricted utility areas here, which was really fun in theory and also honestly pretty boring, unless you're a missionary who's been at the MTC for a couple months. Next week, or probably the Monday after next, I should have much more entertaining things to share. We're just running around trying to learn Russian and trying to eat through all the food that the families of the sisters in my district have sent them. There's so much. 

Things are really just pretty great. Everything has fallen into a rhythm, and we've all mostly lost any self-consciousness we ever had, and our teachers are as great as ever. Since one of our teachers went to Ukraine we've had a series of substitutes for her. My favorite was probably this hilarious woman from Ukraine who actually reminds me so much of Becca (only Ukrainian, and possibly a bit weirder), and she served in Samara! When she taught us we wandered all around campus learning verbs of motion, which are a little complicated in Russian, so we just ran around and she would call commands in Russian. "Approach the dumpster! Go around the car! Cross through the other missionaries!" And I actually feel pretty confident about verbs of motion now. One of our other teachers closed her last teaching block with us yesterday by showing us photos of her mission and giving us a whole lot of seriously useful practical advice. That was one of the "just put me in Russia right now!" moments.

Sometimes I'm a little nervous because at the end of this week I'm flying to a big scary place where I don't really speak everyone else's language and multitudinous other scary things and sometimes I'm just so ready to get out there. Time to go dispel gloom and sad and discouragement with happy! You can do that, too, wherever you are.

Do I take pictures? Not really...

All my love,

Sister Nielsen