Flashback Friday

Thought I had given up on them, huh? Well, I have been too busy to blog lately (imagine that!) but I have a flashback for today. I have been trying for a while to scan or transcribe my mission journals and emails onto a hard drive to back them up. I really enjoy reading them because I inherited my mom's bad memory and can't remember a lot of little things about my mission. And thank goodness we were allowed to email and my family printed those off for me, because I was a very inconsistent journal keeper on my mission. Those emails have been the journal I would have kept.

Although a lot of little memories of my mission have inevitably fallen through the cracks, there are definitely some that stand out. Of course, I haven't forgotten everything, and this experience was hard to forget. It was even more memorable to me because I had only been in Russia for a week or less when this happened. Here is what I emailed home:

"The last couple of days have been wild. We had a really great first discussion with the deaf Ukrainians, Yelena and Tanya, and we were in a hurry because we were going to be late. So we grabbed a taxi (stuck out our hand) and a man stopped and we got in. He started talking to Sister Pope about our church, and then later, he said in Russian, “I don't like...” We couldn't hear the rest. Anyway, he flipped the car around really fast, like a U-turn, and it was really scary and unexpected. He stared to slowly go the other way, and Sister Pope told him to stop, and he said no. She told him again and he still said no. I got an impression that we should get out of the car. He was still going, but really slowly. I opened my door, and Sister Pope heard me do that, so she opened hers too, and we both got out and ran. We thought that he was going to turn around and come after us, but he didn't, thank goodness. It was scary. Then that night, our doorbell rang at 2:00 in the morning. Sister Pope woke me up, and we thought it might be one of our members who had been there that night and said that she wasn't going home that night (family trouble, I guess). But I knew it wasn't her. I don't think that Sister Pope would have opened the door anyway. But we decided not to open our door from 9:30 at night until we leave in the morning, unless it is the Elders. So that was kind of scary too. I have to go soon, but just some interesting things about this place: All of the ladies wear really short skirts and high heels. I swear, they're gonna regret it, because the roads here are sooo bad. Pot holes everywhere. It's a mess. And people still dress like they're going on a date or something."

Let's just say that it was an interesting first week in Russia. It did get less dramatic and action-packed.

Here we are with the cake Sister Pope made for my birthday. (These pictures are much later when I had been in Russia long enough to chub out on their yummy pastries and bread.)