Well, it's Wednesday again already! Time's starting to slip past a little faster. I remember a while ago, I was getting into bed and I thought, "Wow, it really feels like time's going by pretty quick!" I then realized it was still my first week here. Thankfully, those days are past, and as odd as it seems, not only was last Saturday my one-month-in-country mark, but a week from tomorrow, this transfer ends. I've almost been here an entire transfer. That's strange to think about...
So on Monday night, we went over to a member's house for family home evening. We taught them a little lesson and played a game, and then we went out to the trolley bus stop to go home, along with another member named Yulia. It was cold outside, and Elder Hanson and I were both not wearing hats (I was still wearing a scarf, gloves, and thermal underwear). Yulia, like every other Ukrainian person we've met, saw that we weren't wearing hats and instantly decided we were in the early stages of hypothermia. This led us into a discussion about Ukrainian beliefs concerning the cold. She kept trying to tell us that it was the cold that made people sick, not germs (she actually laughed at us when we said that germs were what made people sick). She finished the conversation by saying this: "There was another elder here who didn't believe me, so he went home and walked on cold tiles with bare feet. And he had to go home early with kidney problems!"
So, if there's one thing I can safely say I've learned during my time here, it's that having cold feet gives you kidney problems.
Well, we're still having trouble finding investigators, but it's definitely not from a lack of trying. I've already gotten three first lessons under my belt, although only one was promising at all. The first was to a guy who was so convinced he was already saved that the member we had on the lesson with us (a really cool returned missionary named Zhenya) laughed out loud at him; the second was to a man with a mouthful of gold teeth who told us that if we'd read more Tolstoy, we'd forget about all this Mormon stuff; and the third was earlier this week when we taught a lady and her husband. The husband wasn't really interested (he told us straight off that: "I'm an Atheist. I'm Pravoslavnic." Pravoslavnic is the Ukrainian name for the Orthodox church) but the wife seemed to gain some interest as we continued. Anyways, they haven't let us come back yet, which is sort of the story of my mission so far.
Let's see...I don't think I've talked about the transportation here yet, so let me describe that real quick. Here's the basic kinds of transportation here: there's trolleybuses (which are like regular big-city buses, except they're attached to cables running above the roads; they have the unfortunate tendency to come off the cables, and then you have to wait for the driver to reattach it), there's autobuses (which are like normal buses, or like trolleybuses without the cables), there's marshrutkas (which are like a cross between a very short bus or a very large van; they have routes and stops like buses, but they only stop if someone outside waves them down or if someone inside tells them to stop, so it's quicker than a bus, but it costs more), there's the metro (your typical subway, except when you get to downtown Kiev the metro stops are really deep underground, so you take these incredibly long escalators to get down to them), and there's tramvyes (which are like streetcars; they're all pretty old, and they don't work too well). Everything costs 50 kopek (about 10 cents) except for the marshrutkas, which cost about 1 gryven and 25 kopek (or twenty five cents).
Well, I'm doing well otherwise. I had a cold for a while that was really annoying, but other than that, things here are going great! I love you all, and good luck this week!
Love,
--Elder Brett Hurst
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