January 30, 2013 - Week 11

Well this will be my last weekly email home from the MTC!! Crazy!  I can't wait to be in an airplane in 5 days.  Just think, this time 1 week from today I will probably be doing some first day contacting with my new companion.  Sure hope he speaks Russian cause I don't really know how effective I'll be hahha.  Just a few noteworthy things happened this week.  First, we got our travel plans!!! And our Russian nametags!! Both in the same day!  So I know this is what you've all been waiting for:

Monday morning I am to meet outside the MTC travel office at 5 am where we will be given our passports and boarding passes and everything.  Then we will take some sort of bus I'm assuming to the SL airport.  I fly from Salt lake to Denver, departure at 8:54 am and arriving in Denver at 10:36 am.  I have a few hours of layover where I plan on stuffing my face with real food (after 12 weeks of the same food served everyother week gets really old, really fast).  We then get on a plane and leave Denver at 2:55pm and arrive in, are you ready for this, Frankfurt, Germany at 8:30 am!!!!!  (I am told this is all local time, but its kinda speculation since we haven't heard officially from the travel office - I don't see why it wouldn't be though so I'm going with it).  We stay in Frankfurt for a few hours and then board a plane to St Petersburg(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) at 1:10 pm.  If everything goes according to schedule, I should land in St Petes at 7:00 pm on Tuesday February 5th!  It'll be a long day, but so worth it I'm sure!

When we got our plans I was litterally jumping up and down (picture that if you can imagine) and started jumping even higher when I saw that I would be making a pit stop in Germany.  So exciting!

Now for the less exciting things that happened this week... I can't really think of much else haha.  After a while, the MTC is just the MTC. Same old thing every week.  We did do something kinda fun this week though in class.  We talked about teaching less active members as opposed to investigators, then did some practice.  It is so much more fun (for me) to teach less actives.  I just feel way more comfortable kind of talking about problems and helping solve them than presenting new information to people.. if that makes sense.  It just feels like with investigators there's so much pressure on you to teach them, but with less active members, they basically already know what they need to, they just need that boost again.  I really liked it.

Another fun thing that we did yesterday was teach one of our teachers as himself, in English.  I loved it.  It was like an actual discussion rather than trying to teach him new things.  I just loved it so much, the spirit was so strong and I definitely got a re-affirmation of how much God loves each of his children so much and knows exactly what they need.

District with Sister K.

We also did exchanges this week, within our district.  Sis Kusnetsova thought she was doing it to us as a punishment, but we all ended up loving it.  I taught with Sister Ham and Elder Sehnert.  So great!  I feel like we had really good lessons.. except one.  We taught 3 lessons with this arrangement all to the same investigator.  Our second visit to her, she kicked us out though.. it was weird.  Right from when we walked in it was weird because everything that happened was just funny so we kept laughing.  We kept trying to pull ourselves back together, but it just got out of control and she told us to leave because we were wasting her time.  I felt really awful about it afterwards, but I'm kinda glad it happened because I learned from it.  It's just hard to do investigator lessons with your teachers because some of them are really horrible actors and bad at staying in character so its hard to tell when they are like trying to throw in an inside joke from class or something and it really messes you up when you already go in knowing that its your teacher.  Follow what I'm saying?  Anyways... I really appreciate the program, its just hard sometimes.

We also practiced door knocking.  I told Elder Fernandez that I would give the lesson if he could get us in the door so when we had been talking at the door for a little while he asked if we could come in and "Миша" said, "Конечна нет  это моя квартира - of course not, this is my appartment" hahaha.  After a while of still talking at the door, Миша turned to me and asked why I wasn't talking.  Elder Fernandez told him I didn't speak Russian haha.  So even if I would have wanted to say something later on I couldn't because apparantly I don't understand or speak Russian... needless to say I just stood there awkwardly for about 5 minutes while he and Elder Sehnert talked and set up another appointment.  That was kinda exciting.   BTW, the way I got us into the first door,  I told him that I was really cold and asked if we could come in haha.  Otherwise he definitely would not have let us in.

Anyways.. thats about all the exciting things that happened this week.  Just more practicing and learning and getting ready for Russia!! So exciting!!

Sure hope everyone is doing well and staying healthy!  Apparently there is another little sickness flying around the MTC, but I refuse to get sick before I leave!  I will stay healthy!

Love and miss you all!

Старейшина Робисон

PS - Happy birthday to Lizzy this week!