To Russia With Love: Family! September 2, 2013

Dear family and friends,

This week. We had zone conference Tuesday and Wednesday! So traveling to St. Petersburg was really fun. The city is gorgeous and so exciting. It's like going from Burlington to Seattle! but not. I love Russia so much, Its really growing on me, and the language,even though i'm no where near fluent,is so gorgeous. At zone conference we were able to stay in Avtova with Sister Chartrand (my MTC companion), that was so much fun and it was so good to see friends and hear stories and such. Zone conference was really good, it's always nice to get a boost up after hard months.

Pskov is just so amazing and gorgeous!i am just loving it here. The work is slow but it's definitely progressing! We have four investigators right now and we really love them. Teaching lessons is probably my favorite thing. Being able to bring the spirit into the lives of others and help them come unto Christ is so incredible. I really feel so blessed to be a part of this work!

We have English conversation group every Wednesday at 7 and we have been having a pretty good turn out! When i was conducting last week it was just hilarious. I can't even explain what a Russian accent speaking English is...but it's hilarious. We have a routine where we write down vocab in Russian and English on the black boards and then the "students" will match the words. once that is done we go through all of the words again and then have people create sentences using the words. This one interesting man raised his hand first and created the sentence "my life is death"...then did the scariest laugh i have ever heard in my life. He repeated the sentence over and over and pretty soon had the entire room laughing. (he said this to get a laugh out of everyone, he wasn't serious). I had no idea where to go off of that, um mm good sentence? I then congratulated him at his brilliant sentence and using TWO of the words, then moved on while he continued repeating the sentence. Interesting. The president of our branch was there as well learning, and he knows quite a bit, but came up to me after class and randomly said "she sells sea shells by the sea shore" (imagine a Russian saying that). I broke down laughing it was so funny.

I will be sending lots of pictures this week! sorry I