Hallo

Hello! It was a good week! Let's get down to it! Monday was a great day, I got to talk to all of you and we capped off the day with a great lesson with a guy who called us out of the blue. I don't remember if I told you about him last week, but he was drunk walking around with his wife about a year ago and some missionaries helped them out. He finally got around to calling us last week, and we had a good meeting. He knows english pretty well, so we invited the senior couple and taught him in english. He was really excited to get his own copy of the Book of Mormon. On Tuesday, we had district meeting. After that Elder B and I had interviews with President Childs, it was great. It was just kinda a chatting session, but it was a good one! I really like President Childs, he knows what he is doing. We went on splits with the APs that night. We (Elder Dibble (lax player from JHS)) taught two less actives, one of them who is sick and has bad legs and can't come to church because of that. He said all he needs is a ride, and that missionaries haven't talked to him in a while and he wondered why. So, we're going to get him a ride. On Wednesday we had service in the Hermitage in the morning, that was really really fun. I like doing it, we meet some cool people. We met a huge group of english speakers from DOWN UNDA which was fun. We ended our split after that and met up with the others. Had english group with lots of people this time, we made books about our lives, with pictures and all. It was fun. On Thursday we did weekly planning and we planned good. We have Zone Conferences and 2 splits next week, so we wanted to make sure that all will be in order next week. That night we met with a nice babushka member and she fed us dinner. It was fun to be fed for the second time my whole mission... she cooked good food too. Friday we went to lots of addresses that we found in our area book. We had a meeting with a less active, but we got to his house and his dad wouldn't let us in because the member was sleeping. He wouldn't answer his phone either. Bummer. That night we got an interesting call from the man we met on Monday night about Ukraine... that wasn't a fun call. He will still meet with us, but he read something somewhere that said we were spies or something. Lame. Saturday was good, we had stake conference and I went to the adult session for the first time in my life. It was good. We had a great talk from the Bishop in Avtovo, my pal, and from the 2nd counselor in the stake presidency. He talked about self-reliance and about debts, and how they weigh us down, It was sweet. Sunday we had another great session with awesome talks. The Stake President got up and blew everybody away. I loved his talk soo much. He spoke about the commandments in our everyday lives, with some little words here and there about how we need to be clean to grow as a stake. And he addressed all the concerns that I was having about our ward. It was so great! It really strengthened my testimony that these men are called of God and are given strength beyond their own. It's been a great transfer so far, and I really hope that next week I will tell you that our situation is staying the same and we aren't leaving! This is great. I love it here. I love you all. have a great week!

Andrew

A stone's throw from our apartment,  the Neva.

Hermitage Courtyard