July 6, 2011

Hello family! 

I can't believe that it's already JULY?! Oh my goodness. I was just starting to get used to June. Things are great here in Moscow, like usual. 

I'm glad Danny's bug bites are better. I kind of know how he feels. Our apartment is on the 2nd floor of our building and we have lots of trees outside our dome--it's the perfect mosquito place, and since it's so hot we've been sleeping with our window open. I was COVERED with bites the past few weeks, but they're almost all gone now, plus we bought a mosquito-killer that you plug in that we use at night, so that C. Mordwinow and I don't get eaten alive. Oddly, C. X has only gotten one or two small bites...hmmm....

I saw a Holiday Inn here a few weeks ago and thought of Dad's obsession with staying at Holiday Inn Expresses. Hope you're having a good time. Sounds like you are having a fun time. haha

Still kind of slow here. No new investigators, but it's not too discouraging. RIght now we're trying to find a way to contact that is more efficient. We've had a few ideas that we want to try. Of course, the usual fall-back-plan is English prigging. Which actually provided us with some entertaining times this past week. We decided to prig at a different metro station. It wasn't the best, but we were just passing out prigs, kind of spread out so we didn't keep bothering the same people (but still within sight and sound, obviously). I started talking to these two guys who were in this little guard house thing. I couldn't really understand all what they were saying, but no big. I started talking to them about English Club, because the one guy was interested, and this other guy comes up and just starts yelling at him, saying stuff like, "Why are you letting these people be here? YOu should be cleaning them up!" And then he told me that my friends were waiting for me and I needed to go join them. He wasn't too happy that we were there and had told C. Mordwinow that she needed to hop on the metro right now to get out of "his territory" or she was going to have a problem with the police. We weren't in a mood to argue with him, obviously, so we left, but it was kinda funny. We weren't doing anything wrong and that is definitely not "his territory." That same night English prigging, we also got asked where our "disco-teka" is (some probably-drunk man misread our flyer?) and C. Mordwinow received a marriage proposal. Gotta love English prigging. 

We had FHE with our stake patriarch and his wife on Monday, since he's in our ward and they wanted to have C. X over before she leaves (in just about a week! sad...). It was great. They are so awesome. 

Russian is still coming. I need to start working harder to learn words. It's kind of hard to gauge, because it's so up and down depending on the day. I can understand most things that I need to. And speaking is getting better, when I remember words. There are times where I can speak without thinking, but then I'll run into a word that I don't know--or more accurately, have probably heard and read a bajillion times and just can't remember. I've been reading the BoM in Russian since about half-way through the MTC though, and I can usually understand that (because it;s all gospel or context and I can rememer words better when reading as opposed to speaking) and I'm up to Omni already. So it's coming. It's hard to describe. I'm just hoping that by the end of the year I'm to the point where I'm mostly fluent, because I really don't have a lot of time left here, when you think about it.

Whoo! Thanks for the package! I'll hopefully get it right around my birthday. I'm not sure whether I'll get the cards of the package first--I think generally packages get here faster...kind of weird, but that's the trend missionaries have noticed. Have fun on vacation and thanks for everything! Love you!