Lithuania!

Good morning!  It's always fun to wake up to email from  Elder Andrew.  We got some audio files too, so it feels almost like we just got through talking to him!  I love technology (but not as much as [him] you see…)  :-) Sorry - couldn't resist the Napoleon Dynamite reference…  Also, Andrew mentioned that he may or may not have time to email next week (because of transfers.)  So, fair warning…

Hey family!

It's been a pretty nuts week. First off, we had visa trips. I went on the 18th, and we got to go to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania! So we hopped on a plane to Moscow, and I got some interesting, if not particularly photographically stunning shots through the window of Moscow from the air. It is such a huge dang city. We went to our next gate in Vnukova airport, hopped on a very small propellor plane that took us to Vilnius, and got out. Vilnius kind of pretty much looks like Russia, except no big tall buildings. At least from what we saw. Mostly private houses as far as I could see. We went through passport control no problem. But being in that aiport was pretty weird. There's still plenty of Russian going on because it's an airport, but all the signs are in Lithuanian, and then English. No written Russian anywhere to be seen. After quickly exchanging some rubles for Lithuanian money to add to my collection (cool!), we went back through passport control, but in the other direction. The exact same lady was checking my documents. Heh. After some narrowed eyes and awkward questions, she let us through. (Yeah... we came here to renew our Russian visas... and we're already done and ready to go back. Quick, wasn't it?) We boarded the exact same airplane that we took to Vilnius, and went back to Moscow. Ha. After landing in Moscow, we all said a quiet prayer in our hearts that nobody would notice the mistake that the people in Prague made on Elder Elwood's visa (AGAIN! Grrr...). They didn't. We flew back into Samara and the group went home on a minibus. Elder Langston (he did his trip on the 21st) was, as it happened, at the airport already, with the Connells, waiting for the new senior couple, the Childers, to fly in. So I just stuck with them. The new couple flew in, R* took us home, and everything was great. I was ready to hit the hay for my guaranteed 8 hours.

So on the 20th, we had a sweet cultural day (we get one a cycle). We went to this place called Philharmonia, which was basically a really swanky concert hall. All the missionaries in the district, and a whole bunch of members and investigators came. We saw this cool quartet of guys play tango music for a couple of hours. It was a guy on a big old accordian, his son, who was a really good pianist, some other guy with crazy long silver hair on the violin who was amazing, and a guy playing the cello that was old enough to have invented the cello. It was so dang cool. So that was fun.

We also had a meeting with R* and O*. And we FINALLY got to the bottom of what's going on. [Details omitted for privacy reasons - suffice it to say, R* got some bad news and is kind of focused on that situation right now.]

On Saturday, we had a double baptism in Samara - S* from the Avrora Elders' area, and A* from the Bezimianski Zone Leaders' area. I worked with A* almost a year ago back when I was in Bezimianski with Elder Wood. Cool beans! Both of them are so dang cool. Actually, there were 5 baptisms in the mission this weekend, so that was really awesome.

Perhaps the most interesting news from this week is what happened yesterday. Sunday morning, at about 2:00, Elder Langston woke me up with some terrible stomach pains. I gave him a blessing, and then we talked to Sister Sartori on the phone for a while before going back to sleep. The next morning he was feeling a little better, so we went to Sacrament Meeting at least. He was out the rest of the day, so I tried to make myself useful, organized the whole area book and cleaned up a little and stuff. Today we headed to the clinic to get some tests done and try to figure out what's going on. We suspected maybe an ulcer. The doctors did a blood test and an ultrasound (yes, there were many pregnancy jokes made; no, none of them were inappropriate). While observing the ultrasound, I came to the conclusion that Elder Langston has a lot of weird black and white bubbles in his insides. The doctor, no doubt, came to some more educated conclusions. They basically said that they see nothing wrong with him, and he's feeling a lot better today, so hopefully that's the end of that epic saga.

And now here I am. Hopefully everything on your end is going great.

Love,
Elder Broekhuijsen