Merry Christmas

Iasi

This week I got to go back to Iasi on an exchange! I went back with Sora Kelly for the day! It was so much fun. The lights are all up in Iasi and it looks beautiful! Sora Kelly and I did some contacting, and talked non-stop all day long. I still love Iasi and I still love Sora Kelly. It made me miss last transfer.

Me and Sora Iasi

Singing at the embassy

On Thursday this week all the missionaries in Bucharest including Sora and President Hill went to the US embassy to sing. One of the members in the Aviatiei group works at the embassy and was able to get us in to sing. We stood in their main atrium on a grand staircase. There were 30 of us total and we had quite a large audience. Elders Duker, Lex and Pischke took turns playing the Grand piano to accompany us and we sang Christmas hymns in English and Romanian. Not to boast or anything... but we sounded amazing! The emabassy workers were all super impressed. We had lunch afterwards and a number of embassy workers thoguht we were on tour. "Where's your next stop?" they asked. We just laughed.... "uuuhh Church on sunday?" It was so fun, and a great way of improving our reputation in this country. 

O Christmas tree

Me in Iasi

Death by cold

So the weather here hasn't been too terrible yet. It's extremely foggy and frosty but no real snow. Unfortunately Sora and I both came down with colds this week soon after we got back from Iasi. To make it worse however, we arrived back from Iasi Wednesday morning after being on the sleeper train all night, headache, exhausted, and stuffy noses, to discover that we had no hot water. The ice shower didn't exactly help. We have continued to have freezing cold water all week. One day, we woke up hopefully to hot water in the sink, but we quickly discovered that the hot water had not reached the shower. Sora Polatis' companion finished her mission on Wednesday so she joined us in a funny little threesome. She wasn't amused with the freezing water, so we all took turns washing each others' hair in the sink using water heated by the stove. It was rather pathetic. By some miracle we had hot water yesterday, but today it's gone again. We tried calling our proprietar. He doesn't care and blamed it on Bucharest water companies. I really feel like Heavenly Father has blessed me to be able to survive the freezing water. Hopefully something will get fixed very soon....

The paper tree I made

Keep the Faith

Love Sora Rivera