Friday, September 8, 2006

At 10:30 we met up with Cristina from the branch who showed us around Iasi. It was really interesting and I took lots of pictures and I really just love getting to know the city. It’s endlessly interesting to me. Also, Cristina knew a lot of really interesting stuff. Like, the statue in front of the Cultural Palace is really not the person it’s supposed to be. There were two statues and one was supposed to be sent to Poland and one to Iasi. Well, on accident they got switched and then it was too expensive to send them back to the right places, so there’s really some Polish prince or something in front of the Cultural Palace and most people have no clue! Some time after that, Mario walked us over to this office where we signed our contracts. It was funny because it was all of us in this little office room and there weren’t enough chairs so we of course started sitting on each others laps. Well, that’s not exactly normal in Romania, so the cute young lady who worked there was like all concerned and kept trying get more chairs in there for us to sit on because she really just didn’t believe us when we said we were just fine. She also talked to us quite a bit and the whole time she just had this huge smile on her face and it was so cute because you could tell she was totally bewildered and yet totally amused by us. Like she’d never seen anything like these boisterous American girls. Also, you could see she was trying so hard to make us happy and really wanted to impress us. We all decided after she left that we really liked her. Then, we walked home, had a few hours to do what we wanted to do and then walked over to the villa for a missionary fireside. In the in between time, it was interesting because I really wanted to reheat this rice I’d cooked the day before and the only way we’d figured out how to do so was to boil some water in a pan and then stick the rice in a metal bowl in the boiling water. Well, this is going to sound silly, but I was really excited when I realized that instead I could just fry the rice to reheat it! I guess it was just so exciting because it probably saved me like a whole half hour and I was really hungry. After that we went to this missionary fireside at the villa. On the way there there were these little boys and one of them who is really cute ran past us laughing then went into an alley way and as we looked over at him he pulled down his pants (still had his undies on) and patted his little tush and yelled “buuuunaaaa!” At the fireside, first we did this activity where we had to do a bunch of activities and you had to do the activity and then once you completed it you’d either get a clue or you’d get part of the armor of god. Once we got the whole armor of God we had a lesson which us American’s didn’t really understand at all based on what they said but only based on the actions they did. They had these two paper people figurines on the table. One of them had a book of mormon in front. Then we were supposed to throw paper balls at them and it was supposed to show how the book of mormon or maybe the armor of god can protect us. It was really interesting to have a whole church lesson that I totally didn’t understand. Afterward we all chatted and ate some dessert. One of the refreshments was this Romanian spongy cakey thingy that I actually didn’t really like. We went home and Rebecca came over and actually ended up spending the night because it was took late for her to get home by public transportation. Among other things, I ended up talking to Rebecca for quite some time about the church. She’s had a pretty difficult life and she has some interesting views, not all of which do I totally agree with, but she was at least interested in asking a lot of questions about the church and didn’t seem toooo hostile. Once again I didn’t end up going to bed until like 2.