Hello again from Ukraine!
Well, things are going pretty well. Our area is very, very investigator-free, so we've been out finding quite a bit. The rumors circulating around say that our area is really difficult; it's just that much more of an adventure. I should probably describe what tracting is like for us. We'll go to an apartment building, choose a pidyeest, and then go to the door. Seeing as how they're products of the former Soviet Union, each pidyeest door is made of metal and has a punch code on it; since the fall of the USSR, the code is really useless, but instead of do something like change the door, they just kept them, code and all; luckily, and still owing to them being products of the Soviet Union, they're really easy to get into. It basically involves pushing in random buttons until the door unlocks itself. So, once we've cracked the code, we climb inside, where we enter a dark, shadowy, concrete landing about twelve feet by twelve feet. There's usually a few apartments here, a staircase, and an elevator. We'll take the elevator up to the top floor (an adventure in itself--most elevators here aren't very reassuring looking), and then, if we're lucky, there will be a hallway leading in both directions with about four apartments in each direction; if we're not lucky, the apartments will be behind another locked door with doorbells for all of the apartments inside. We ring the top doorbell, wait for the person to come outside and, without fail, yell, "Khto?!", which means "Who!?" We tell them, and then they either reject us, open the door, or as in one case, wait in the little hallway and warn anyone else we try to get that it's the missionaries and they shouldn't come out. Anyway, after we talk to the first person, we wait for their door to close and push the doorbell below theirs. It's kind of handy in a way; it's like Tracting Light, where you still work hard, but without all the walking. Anyway, we do this from the top floor down (it's referred to as "knocking down a building," as in knocking on the doors, not actually destroying the buildings...) and, if we have time, we move to the next pidyeest and start all over. Oh, and something else about the apartment buildings: no matter how nice the apartments are, no matter how expensive they are, the stairwells and the outside of the building are always covered in trash, grafitti, cigarettes, gum, needles, so that it always looks like your going into an abandoned, post-apocalyptic building right up until someone opens their apartment door and you see the really nice interior.
One thing that has taken no time to adjust to here is the food. It's definitely different than in the States, but in very good ways. I love it! Borscht is fantastic (red and green versions, especially with Smetana, which is like sour cream except it actually tastes good...), verenyky (sort of like ravioli in a way, but without a sauce...I think it's the Ukrainian version of pirogi, but I could be wrong) is delicious, and my favorite is pel'meny, which is like a smaller verenyky that you boil. Plus, Ukrainians love two things: juice, and sauces. Their juices are AMAZING (I'm addicted right now to "Morkva-Yabluchka," or "Carrot-Apple") and cheap (all of their food is really cheap, we can do a weeks worth of groceries for about thirty to forty gryven, and there's five gryven to a dollar). Also, I guess Ukrainians really like ketchup, because they have a half a million different varieties of it (the best: shashliky ketchup, or ketchup with onion flavor). They also have a lot of sauces we don't have, like Paprik sauce (I'm not even sure what's in it--paprika and something else, maybe smetana) which is, also, very good. I've started putting them on everything, especially scrambled eggs. Oh, and the bread here is fantastic! I buy these large round loaves for about a gryven eighty kopek (kopek are like our cents, in that it takes a hundred kopek to equal a gryven), which translates out to about thirty six cents, and there's this nice inactive lady we visited who gave us a lot of Ukrainian honey (more crystalized than our honey; REALLY good). It's really nice to come home after a long day and have a slice of bread with honey and a glass of carrot-apple juice, maybe with some pel'meny with ketchup and paprik...It's really good food. It's not fancy at all, but it tastes great.
Oh, and people here love techno. As in, they LOVE techno. Every bus, every marshrutka (like a large van, or a small bus), every store, and especially every internet club pumps out techno nonstop. Before long, you really start to miss what instruments sound like. (Unless "drumbeat machine" counts as an instrument).
Speaking of instruments, though, our ward had its Christmas party a week or two ago (it was for the Ukrainian christmas), and they had a string quartet from the ward play. They were incredible! People here really love music. It's too bad they only play techno.
Well, I've got to get going, but I love you all, and I'll write again next week!
Love,
--Elder Brett Hurst
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