Or so we we are told when one of our investigators hands us chocolate.
Hi! I finally succeeded in taking and attaching photos, so I should probably talk about them too. Assuming these pictures send and are what I think they are. Good luck.
We went to Toliatti, as promised! We also go there again tomorrow, which is a bit excessive, but we're supposed to. I'll probably take some sleeping pills for the bus. No shame. But we did splits with the sisters and it was rad. It snowed pretty much the whole time, and we got lost an embarrassing amount. It took us three bus rides to get home one morning because we kept passing our stop (the windows were foggy, okay). That should be a picture of me and sister Thomas by a sign (pay no mind to the pub behind us) that we found between meeting a nice woman who gave us the wrong directions to the bus station and actually finding the bus station. So splits was nice, and effectively used up half our week.
One of my accomplishments of the week was eating meat jello! It's called holodets or something that I cannot spell in any language. You all should know that it is neither as bad as some Americans led me to believe nor as good as some Russians tried to convince me it is. I ate one of my companion's portions so I will have very strong bones, apparently. I took a picture! That's all pretty Russian food, so maybe it's interesting. I hope so.
That last picture is where it gets interesting. I'll try to explain. Remember Aleksei, our physicist historian friend? He wrote that out for us. I'll try to translate it, but I don't think it would make sense even in English. We show up at his apartment the other night for a lesson, and he tells us he wants to show us something interesting he discovered. All right. Here's how it went:
"I was looking you guys up on the internet and I found something really interesting..."
"yesssss...."
"You were telling me about this Joseph Smith guy, and I found on the internet that he predicted the Second Coming would be in 1891"
(we spend about 10 minutes trying to explain that we believe that no one knows when the Second Coming will be except for God, although I'm assuming what he read had something to do with D+C 130, and he scrolls all over wikipedia looking for where he found it)
finally:
"So yeah, I thought it was really cool that he predicted it would be in 1891, because that's when I predicted it would be too."
WHAT
So basically what's on the sheet of paper is 1. when the early Roman Catholic church though the Second Coming would be, 2. the fall of the Roman Empire, 3. The fall of queens authority in Great Britain (I don't know history... the revolution thing that involved Oliver Cromwell or something). 4. Some mostly meaningless math, and- the years 1891 (not the second coming), 1917 (revolutions in Russia), and 1929 (the beginning of the great depression).
Or something. This man uses a lot of words that aren't in my dictionary. He also predicts the outcome of elections, here and in America.
So I don't know what the Roman empire or Britain or the great depression have to do with anything, but I do know that it's a miracle I understood anything on that lesson. We had a pretty smooth transition into faith, somehow. At the end of the lesson he offered to write me out a whole scroll of paper with his signature method of predicting which days will be my up days and down days throughout my life based on only my birthday. I'm actually pretty excited, although I have no faith that it will be accurate at all. ("wait, how long will that take you?" "an hour, maybe two" what.)
If you didn't get anything I tried to explain for the last three paragraphs, don't worry. I
didn't either.
Anyway, things are going well, trio life is as great as ever, and I'm pretty sure I want to stay in Kazan for a long time. There's still so much of our area I've barely been in, and I'm only just starting to find out who all the people on the branch list are (other than those who come to church). Kazan is great.
I've dumped pretty much all the thoughts in my head into this email. What else: Captain Moroni is hilarious and a role model for sass, but that's not new., Write down your personal revelation, and also I'm really out of shape.
Seriously. I did like ten squats and now I can't walk up stairs.
I love you all! You are awesome. Have the best week!
Sister Nielsen
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