Spring = Drunk Guys

Even in St. George, the first thing to do on a Monday morning is check for Andrew's email!  Happily, our hotel has internet.  (Let's face it, we wouldn't choose one without it…)  Also happily there was an email there waiting for us this morning.  Here it is for your reading pleasure.

Hey everyone!

Whoa, man. This is Elder Hale's last P-day. You don't know him, but he's awesome. And exactly one week from now he'll be on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Crazy.

Things are chugging along here in good ol' Samara. Life is great, the missionary work is going well, and I'm still learning and growing. The last part of that statement sounded pretty cheesy, didn't it? Oh, well. Sorry.

The visa trip went really well. More or less without a hitch. We headed out through Moscow to Kiev, had some time to go contacting in Kiev.  Man. I think 75% of the people we talked to were absolutely smashed, and it was like 3:00 PM. Maybe it had something to do with Easter coming up. (Russian Orthodox Easter is this coming Sunday)

Speaking of Easter, you remember those little plastic sleeves that you can put on boiled eggs, and then dip them in really hot water, and they shrink and form-fit around the egg? Well I found some at the market (such a poor translation of the work "reinok") for 10 rubles for 8 of them. So... about 3 cents each. Ish. Yesterday I spent our lunch hour making Easter eggs with KITTENS on them! I'll send pictures next week if I remember.

What else is awesome? This week we met a guy on a tram on the way up to the branch building named I*.  He's super cool. We set up a meeting with him that night and he brought a friend named D* who is super hilarious. And both of them are really interested in the Book of Mormon. We have a meeting with them both tonight at 7:30 and they'll become progressing. They're so awesome. It's a huge testimony-builder for me that there's tons of just regular old people that haven't been super humbled by life circumstances who are still open to new ideas and new truths that they weren't aware of before.

So. Our area is actually doing pretty rough. We just cleaned out the area book and made things a little more realistic, and we don't have any progressing investigators, don't have any investigators with a baptismal date, and don't have any investigators who are attending church. But we're celebrating our very own home-brewed holiday called Diligence Week!!!? (The punctuation there is mandatory). And today we'll have two new progressors. Hope is never lost!

Man, with the weather, we've seen an approxinate 2033% increase in the number of drunk people everywhere. One of my favorite streets in the entire Russia Samara Mission is right by our house, Leningradskaya. It's a walking street, and also the best route to get to the mission office. But starting at 7:00am and ending at about 5:00am, it's now covered in drunk people. I'm talking hundreds of them. It's ridiculous. I didn't really realize before just how much of a society problem it is here with all the cheap terrible alcohol everywhere. You can barely walk 25 steps in any direction without being approached by a smashed guy who feels entitled for other people to give him money to buy more beer or vodka. "Hey guys, give me 15 rubles!" So unfortunately, Leningradskaya is no longer allowed for us. Missionaries have had too many incidents on that street in the past. It's too bad; that street is so beautiful and cultural. I'm not being sarcastic about that; I'll show you some pictures in the fall or the winter when I can go on it again.

Well, okay. That's pretty much the update. Thanks for all you do! Ooh! By the way, I got my package! Thank you so much! It's so awesome! I may have eaten the entire box of Samoas within 5 minutes of opening the package. Possibly. And thanks for the earmuffs! The weather here keeps being bipolar (I thought I escaped that aspect of Utah weather?), so even though today is really hot actually, I'm sure we'll get a freak snowstorm by the end of the week.

I love you all! Have a sweet time in California, send everyone my love!

Cool.

Love,
Elder Broekhuijsen