Hello Family!!! Sorry its been so long since i sent pictures! Hopefully these will be sufficient for a while. I'm just starting to realize how much more i should be taking pictures of what i am doing:) This week has been pretty good! This last Sunday was a lot of fun in our branch. Since it was Easter Sunday it was great to see all of the traditions they have here that i never knew about. One of the main traditions was the making of this little 'cakes' of some kind. They kind of looked like muffins but were much taller. I think in the Provaslavnic church here they take the cakes and have them blessed by the priests with holy water. So, since we don't really believe like they believe we had a great time just eating the cakes and talking. They also have the fun tradition of painting eggs like we do but they have a little game to go along with it. After the eggs are all set and hard boiled, we would all grab eggs and hold it so that the nose of the egg was pointing up and we would tap them against others egg's until one of them would crack. Whoever's didn't break that was the person that won. It was pretty funny and I'm actually not too shabby at the egg cracking game:) you'd all be surprised:) Then to top things off just perfectly was the confirmation of Kolya. We had the opportunity to stand in the circle as the branch president gave him the gift of the Holy Ghost. It was such an amazing feeling to take part in that and realize that he had finally become a member of the church after so many years. It was great!!
SO, below are the pictures. I hope all is going well at home and it was so exciting to hear about the baby blessing! I'm so happy for you, Megan and Joe!! You two will be great parents! i love you all and I can't wait to hear from you!
With love,
Elder Ostler
This is a picture of the Azov Sea. It was pretty cool!!!
This is an old USSR piano at the church building where we meet.
This is me eating one of my first Shaorma's (maypma) and Mariopul is famous for having the best! the meat is kind of sketchy so its one of those things in life you try once and don't really have the desire to try again. :)
This is our church building here in Marioupol.
Where our toilet once was.
Our lovely sink.
This is our district watching conference. Something was wrong with the recording, so the Russian translation went at the same time as the English so we heard both at the same time and had to pay VERY close attention in order to understand.
This was a picture from the baptism of Kolya. Elder Smith, Kolya and I.
This is a picture of pretty much everyone who attends our branch,
though last Sunday we had a few more because of the Easter holiday.
This is me singing "I Know That My Redeemer Lives" in Russian at the baptismal program.
So....we had some previous elders who used the wall as a dart board, so we had the opportunity to wall putty the holes and put up new wall paper!
This is the wall after the wall paper was removed.
This was after new wall paper was put up. It was beautiful! I think you would all be proud. :)
This was taken when I was on a split with another elder when we were searching in the countryside for a contact we had received a while back that needed to be found.
