Monday, August 24, 2009

First Week of real missionary work

Our first real week of work. We had a fun experience. We helped the Elders set up a table in the city center and then we went to the square to sit and practice the language. An elderly gentlemen came up to us and started to speak. We practiced our very little bit of hungarian with him. He gave us his address and phone number and we will go by with the Elders to visit him. The Elders also had a good time and found 3 new contacts. One has had contact with the elders before and then moved and lost track of them. They had tried to use the internet to find them but couldn't. But now we found them.
I, Karen, am going to teach singing in primary, visit the Young Women or in our case, Young Woman class, teach temple prep and write the ward newsletter. Bruce will be busy with the Elders quorum and also teaching temple prep. We are also the new teachers of the advanced English Class. We are going to cheat a little and take our MTC grammar guide which we thought was well developed and teach it backwards.
We are visiting in the homes of all the members and also tracking down all of the inactives. It has been done before, tracking down the inactives, by other sets of missionaries, but maybe this will be their time to change.
We are learning to adjust. You are forced into obeying the "eat less meat" thing because it is so expensive here. And you can't just go to the store and buy what you need for a recipie. They do have big grocery stores here but strangely enough they cater to hungarian cooking, which i know nothing about. It is hard to find oatmeal, raisens come in little single serve packs, I can't find cornstarch, brown sugar is limited and not ground small like ours. They have great chocolate but no chocolate chips. Milk comes only in a liter and is expensive. We are training ourselves to like box milk. Baking powder, soda and spices are deceptive and hard to find. They don't use much cinnamon and I haven't found nutmeg. We mostly like just to eat bread and cheese and tomatoes and we did find a few ready to eat meals that were okay and better than cooking. Chicken breast is $4 a pound.
There are no dryers, just big drying racks. Bruce bought his shirts from MrMac and after the first wash we find that they have permanent wrinkles that we can't iron out. Washers are very small and usually in the bathroom with drainage into the tub.
They have the most wonderful chocolate and ice cream here. We just have to pretend that we don't know that.

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