A Weird Week!

Hello Everyone! As usual I'll try to answer all of your questions in this email if I can. So I say this week was weird because we saw some crazy stuff, some of it I can't say haha, it was too messed up. But I'll inform you on the rest haha, so yesterday, which was Sunday, we went and walked around and contacted after church, and some random guy raged at us because I'm an American, which happens kind of often with drunk or high people, then we kept walking and some crazy babushka walked up to us and just started crying, and then we cross the street, and some guy is literally just peeing on the sidewalk, and this is on one of the most busy and biggest streets in our town, there are people walking all over the place, and he is just peeing there, for everyone to see, and then he raged at us and tried to swear in English, then another guy asked us if we would go buy bread with him right after that, because he thought we were rich Americans because we are missionaries.

We also saw plenty of other stuff, like a huge Communist protest in front of a war memorial, full of propaganda and stuff, from which I got a legit communist copy of pravda, their newspaper, I'm sending it home in a package asap to you guys with everything else I wanna give you, I'm trying to go lightweight, so for Jake I'm getting a Russian military flag, for Dad I got the newspaper and other communist stuff because I think he would find it interesting and I don't know what else he would want haha, and for Mom and Kiley I don't know yet, we'll see, it's all inexpensive stuff though, so no worries.

So Elder Reigngard and I should be here for another 6 or 7 weeks but we won't know until next Friday for sure, so I'll let you know then, to answer your question, he is from Semphviropal, Ukraine. I don't know how to spell it in English, and our address, which I also don't know how to spell in English, is 185 Prospect Derzinskovo, Novorossyissk. The Russian is coming along good here still, I dream and think in Russian a lot haha, it's pretty cool! I'm super lucky to have a native speaker as a trainer, it helps a lot. I'm attaching some photos of the Communist protest, just part of it, and of a Provaslavnic church holiday about pancakes, no joke, it a week-long celebration where you eat pancakes, we had some of course, but their version of pancakes is our version of crepes. I wonder if Luke has had any legit French crepes yet. I wonder if Clark has had some Gual Bertos food equivalent in Mexico yet too haha. How is Cody doing by the way, I don't know his email or anything, I hope he's doing well!

Our investigators are still progressing except for Igor 2, we haven't heard from him in a while sadly. No new investigators this week, there was a ton of rain, people don't like to talk in the rain, so what we do now is we put up a sign at the branch building that says, "I'm American, let's play chess!", the Russians love playing chess, especially the older ones, so I've already played a couple times, and we are gonna go to a chess club and play there and see if we can find someone haha. Did I tell you that I teach English every Thursday here? We both do it, it can be a good way to find investigators, but the weather should be pretty good soon which should help improve missionary work a lot. Well that's all for this week! I love all you guys! Peace!

-Elder Skene