Monday, October 19, 2015

I finally got to watch The Testaments

Actually only about half. Some of the exciting side effects of having a companion whose leg is falling off.

That's an exaggeration, of course. Don't worry about Sister Wilson's leg. Too much. We didn't stay in all that much either, which is good, because we were barely in our area this week. We had a conference in Samara, which is 8-9 hours and a time zone away from us. We spent pretty much all of Wednesday and all of Friday traveling. 

How was that? Well, I'm more than a week behind in my journal still, so apparently not super productive bus rides. I also had some delightfully authentic Russian outhouse experiences. Literal holes in the ground! Sometimes if they're luxurious they have doors, but don't expect the doors to close.

Our conference was great, though. We heard from a member of our area presidency and from a counselor in the general young women's presidency. We talked a lot about faith, which I'm pretty sure we could talk about in every meeting and not run out of things to talk about. 

Another thing about the conference was that it involved two zones, so I was reunited with almost all of the missionaries I was with in the MTC (except one. poor sister Graham). It was super interesting because I kind of expected some of them to have changed, but everyone is exactly the same. Except they're in Russia. I guess I probably haven't changed in the last two months either. For example, here's a sample conversation with one of the elders (who won't be specified):
me: "How's your Russian?"
Elder __:"Better than yours!"
Ahh, classic. That's probably funnier to me than it is to any of you, but I hope you appreciate it anyway.
Don't worry, I dealt him a reasonable portion of sass later.

Also I don't know who's idea it was to house ten sisters in one apartment while we were down there, but it wasn't that brilliant.

I managed to break another watch moving around mattresses in said apartment. That brings my total number of wristwatch casualties to three. Actually, this one is still at least functioning sort of, but due to the smashed face and the tendency to randomly stop and start again, I've decided to retire it.

There were real live Americans in church yesterday! That weren't missionaries, I mean. A lawyer from Salt Lake City is a guest lecturer at one of the universities here, and he and his wife showed up! They were so American. It was weird. They absolutely loved our branch despite not understanding anything.

We actually do have a pretty sweet branch up here. If I'm out of here next week (One of us is almost definitely, so we'll see who it is on saturday) I'm sure going to miss it. 

Last night we started talking to a random woman who spontaneously invited us over to her house to have tea with her daughters. That's pretty unusual for here. She wanted us to share a spiritual thought (good, because we were going to anyway). We had a sweet chat about God and his plan for us. He really does have a plan for us. He knows what we're going to do and who we're going to run into. Think about God's plan more often and think about how you can rely on Him more. Because it's entirely worth it.

I love you all and hope your personal study of the scriptures is going well. Also I hope your lives are going well, but if your scripture study isn't you should take this as your cue to re-evaluate it. Have a great week!

Sister Nielsen

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