Sunday, September 10, 2006

This was our first Sunday in Romania and also my first day with the use of a curling iron. Thank goodness!!! Church was at 10 and we all got ready and then walked on over to the villa. We were early, so we just sat down for a little while before it all started and observed it all. First we had sacrament, which was all in Romanian. I barely understood it whatsoever, and so by the 2nd talk I was struggling to stay awake. I definitely managed to however. Sunday school was after that and was in the same room. It was taught by Sora Lydia. It was a bit of a struggle because one of the elders was translating for her except he wasn’t very good at figuring out what to say, she kept interrupting and not giving him time to translate and even if he didn’t get the words out there we didn’t usually understand him because he had a very thick British accent. I loved them for trying though because how nice is it that they had a person translate, just for us. It was however, very difficult to participate and answer questions though since we couldn’t follow the conversation very well. The classes luckily got easier as they came though, because I understood almost all of Relief Society. For this we moved into a different room but had the same teacher because the girl that was supposed to teach didn’t show up (she’s a single mom with 2 kids and is so poor she has to work all day long and leave the kids at home by themselves, so I can imagine she must have been just too tired to make it, let alone prepare a lesson). But this time we had Sora Hanks translate, who is absolutely amazing. She’s only been in Romania for 4 months and already she’s virtually fluent. She translated really fairly easily and phrased it all so we understood. On the walk back from church, that same little kid who’d mooned us a few days before ran up to us and started trying to pull all of our skirts up. Luckily we were too quick for him. He’s about 5 by the way. I wonder what else he has up his sleeve. Before going back to Podul at 3 I cooked some rice and veggies for later and read some of the really good book I’m reading called “With God, For the People.” It’s about the Pastor who basically started the Romanian Revolution in 1989. At 3 we all went over to Podul for an early dinner. None of us had eaten lunch so we were staaarving. Dinner was sooo good because we had spaghetti and cheesebread. It was hilarious because this whole trip we’ve all gotten sick a whole lot, especially with digestive problems, as was expected. So when Marina said the prayer to bless the food she said something like “please bless us to not get sick in any way” or something which struck us all as really funny and she burst out laughing and couldn’t finish the prayer. So finally she gasps “sheri, finish it!” so I somehow got through the end of the prayer myself without laughing. I’m pretty sure that’s the only time I’ve ever finished someone else’s prayer. It was hilarious. After dinner we had our weekly meeting in which we basically talked about the whole rest of the week and also about our highs and lows for this last week. It was pretty interesting to talk about. Also, next week, since we don’t really have any pressing engagements on Tuesday or Wednesday we decided that’d be a good time to go to the Black Sea – especially since it’ll be too cold later. So um, I love how we just decided to up and go and we’ll be on a train for the black sea about this time tomorrow. We’ll take a sleeper train from Monday at 11pm to about Tuesday at 7am and take another one back from Wednesday night to Thursday night. But as for tomorrow, we’ll just try and get our apartment fixed and go to the hospital for a few hours. Oh and also have FHE. After the meeting we had about an hour and a half before our home teachers, the Right’s came over. In that time I basically read and got my toenails done by Marina. When they came over we talked for a while and then I fell asleep on accident while they were giving their lesson because I was all tangled up on Marina and Shannon and was soooo tired.