Post Christmas voice musing

 Voice Message #2

Hello, everybody! Making another voice recording because people liked it, and I can speak much quicker than I can type, so it makes it easier for me too. I don’t think I’ve written one for a little bit.

So for Christmas -well, let’s start with Christmas Adam. Which, if you don’t know what Christmas Adam is, Christmas Adam is the day before Christmas Eve. My companion has a very great tradition of eating ribs on the night of Christmas Adam. So we had ribs, but unfortunately, we do not have a lot of cooking supplies, and so the best thing that we had was a large metal mixing bowl. We had to use our metal mixing bowl to make ribs, but they actually turned out pretty good. For Christmas Eve, we just kind of had a regular day, and then we didn’t even have dinner on Christmas Eve, which was kind of sad. We just forgot to eat dinner that day. 

And then Christmas! Christmas was great. We woke up in the morning, I got to call my family, we talked, opened some presents that surprisingly got here. I thought that I would just get them after Christmas, but luckily I got almost all of them before Christmas. So that was really nice to still be able to open up gifts. And so we woke up, called family, and then we had a little breakfast with all the missionaries in Vilnius. So we had breakfast and then we made, like, three hundred cookies. And once we made the cookies - which took forever, because we had to make them and we only have one oven at the church, so it was an all-day process – but we made a ton of cookies and then just street-contacted and we’d give people cookies and say, “Merry Christmas!” We were able to give almost all of them away. The sisters are a lot better at giving cookies out; I think people are just more suspicious of two random dudes handing them some cookies. But two random young ladies are just like, “Oh, here’s some cookies!” And everyone’s just like, “Oh my goodness, cookies! Thank you!” But when it was us, it was like, “Why are you giving me cookies? That’s kind of weird. I don’t trust you.” So we actually only gave out four cookies, and the sisters literally gave out the rest of them. But it just matters that they got out. 

Oh! I forgot to say – I’ll include this: Christmas Eve, I remember why we forgot to eat dinner. It’s because we went to an animal shelter and we walked dogs, because nobody was available to meet on Christmas Eve because they were all with family or doing things there. So we went to an animal shelter and they just give you a dog and then you go walk it around a lake, and then you come back twenty minutes later and you get a new dog. We walked probably ten, twenty dogs, and that was really fun, because I haven’t walked a dog or just played with a dog in a while. So that was super fun! 

Then the night of Christmas, we had a get-together for all the foreigners who are students because there’s a lot of foreigners and students in Vilnius, and not all of them are able to travel or have their family come here, so we just had a little gathering and told everybody, “Hey, if you don’t have anywhere to be for Christmas night, come play games and eat food with us.” And we had a good time! And then we had a really fun branch activity. We had a giant pizza party and then watched Scrooge in Lithuanian. Which, Scrooge is already kind of confusing to watch sometimes. It’s a great movie, a little bit confusing, but in Lithuanian, I was just very lost. I don’t think any of the members had heard of the movie before, so they were also a little lost during the movie, even though they could understand what was happening, it was the first time they’d seen it. It wasn’t a huge hit, but it was really fun because we got to watch a movie in Lithuanian and then have pizza, and then talk to all the members. All in all, it was great.

We actually had a transfer roll around, so I am currently in, drumroll…… Still Vilnius. Big shocker. That means that I’ve been here for a total of eight months now. By the end of this transfer, I’ll have been here for about ten months. I really just hope, for the clout, that I can be here for a full year. To say I was here for ten months doesn’t sound as cool as saying I was here for an entire year. But we had a few changes, so there is some new blood in Vilnius. Things kind of got mixed around. 

And then for New Year’s: New Year’s wasn’t a typical New Year’s because we had to go to bed at 10:30, but the day before, Elder Sieverts and Elder Staglemyer came, and Elder Sieverts is the one that I was companions with for seven months, that was super fun to have him here for New Year’s. We all shared a Ghia – it’s a… calling it non-alcoholic beers sounds bad, but that’s basically what it tastes like. It’s like flavored wheat drink, carbonated, with flavoring. And so we all had one of those because it’s a really popular drink here in Lithuania. So we started the year with cracking a cold one with the boys. And yeah, it was fun! We ended up waking up anyways at 12 o’clock because people here just love fireworks. Just a whole night of fireworks, the next day: fireworks. For Christmas, they do fireworks, so that was new. But yeah, that’s about what I’ve been up to. 

As far as teaching goes, we haven’t been able to meet with a ton of people just because they’re gone, out of the country, vacationing, or they just had family over, so everyone’s really busy. And we didn’t teach a whole lot of lessons, but we ended up, since we weren’t teaching, we ended up doing a lot of finding. We did a lot of street contacting, which I’m not always a fan of, but it does work. It works if you work. So we’ve been doing that, we’ve been bus contacting, where you just hop on a bus and sit next to someone, and you just start talking to them. And the best part is, they can’t run away from you; because on the street, people can just walk away, or they can just leave, but on a bus it’s like, “I have to sit here, and you also have to sit here, and you can just listen to me talk. And you don’t have to talk back, but I sure would like you to.” So that was fun. 

That’s basically it. Other things: I made a goal to start reading the Book of Mormon and the other scriptures just in Lithuanian, just to get extra good at the language. Even personal study, I’m just going to try 100%, all Lithuanian. We’ll see how that goes, hopefully I don’t burn out. But even if I do, it will still be good. Yep, that’s about how I’m doing! I hope everyone is doing great. It’s actually not freezing cold, but it’s still cold, and it’s still wet. But luckily, I have a rain jacket that keeps me warm. All is well. All is well in Vilnius.