Hello Family!!!!!
It's been such a busy week. I'll start of with newsy stuff and then I’ll throw in the things I forgot to mention last week. So the biggest thing from last week is that I was on Croatian TV! Here's the story of how I got there:
So the guy we teach English to is an "actor." He's having a new movie premier soon, so a local TV channel called 4 Rivers decided to have him on a talk show and film other aspects of his life as little inserts in the show. He really likes us and he always tells us about how he's gonna get us and our English class famous. So he had a bit of the show about us teaching him English. So the reporter and the camera man came to the church building and interviewed us about us being missionaries and about us teaching English class and then they filmed us teaching him a mock lesson. The reporter was asking a bunch of questions and finally he said, "Sorry....this isn’t for the interview, I’m just curious." and after we filmed, he said that he was thinking that maybe the 3 of us could be guests on his talk show one night and we could just talk about the church and being missionaries.
So the interview went well and we wanted to watch it on TV that night, but we don’t have a TV, so we asked our land lady if we could come up and watch it. 40 minutes in we got to our spot and it was pretty cool. They put our cell phone number across the bottom of the screen and talked about our free English classes, so hopefully we'll get some new students.
Funny story...The interview did some good. Elder Freeman, one of the assistants, called us on Friday and said, "You guys are famous." I guess he was contacting in Zagreb and some guy said something like "Hey....I saw you guys on TV and heard some stuff about you and you seem better than the Catholics so I think I’m going to go to your church on Sunday" So yeah....it paid off for something.
Next bit of news: My dreams came true on Thursday. I went to a zone conference in Maribor, Slovenia. Since there are the most missionaries in Croatia (like 20) they try to even out the zone conferences by sending some of the Croats to Slovenia and some to Serbia. We got chosen to go to Slovenia. I was so excited when I found out. You don't even know. But anyways, on Thursday morning, we got up at 4, got dressed, walked 20 minutes to the Karlovac bus station, got there for the 5:45 bus and got to Zagreb. The assistants then picked us up and we drove the 2 hours to Maribor, had the conference, and repeated the process backwards to get home and got back about 10 that night. It's such a cool city. I got pictures....don't worry....and I’m even in one of them. While we were waiting for the assistants in Zagreb, we went to a bakery and I finally got to try some burek. I got the meat one. It was so greasy and so good! And then when we got back to Zagreb that night, we got some čivapi which is a Bosnian dish with a pita-like pocket bread, only actually real bread and way better, with a bunch of little sausages inside, and then you put onions on top. It was so good.
So that was the big news for the week. As far as teaching and tracting goes, this last week was known as cold shoulder week. It's a little annoying when you knock a door and some one comes to it just to lock the dead bolt. But oh well... Not a whole lot of interested people. And our investigators and teaching appointments all had scheduling issues, so we didn't have quite as many lessons as we would have liked to. But we had a lesson with a super cool couple. They're probably mid to late 20's and are some of the nicest people I have met here. They kind of remind me of the old next-door neighbors. They're super nice. It was cool talking with them because they both speak pretty much perfect English.....which is way awesome because I can actually communicate. They both believe in God and want to know more about him, but it's just not at the top of the priorities. But we gave them a Book of Mormon and she was really excited for it. They said we could come back next Saturday and talk more. Another cool part is that whenever we talked, they never contradicted us or threw out contradicting statements. They just said that it was interesting and a cool story and they wanted to hear more....which hasn't happened much before.
Some other random stuff.....Croatia, or at least Karlovac, has some funky fashion. Super tight/super bleached jeans are super popular. And if you're cool, you wear them with any high top shoe you can get your hands on. And if you're really cool, you throw on a fanny pack to go with it....yup....fanny packs are huge here. I didn't know anybody actually ever wore them, but they do. A guy in town the other day thought he was super cool because he had a white, leather, Lacoste fanny pack. Who knew that Lacoste actually made fanny packs??? Whenever we see someone with a fanny pack we always whisper, "pack pack pack!" to each other.
I’m trying to think of what else to say and I’m drawing blanks. I’m trying to upload pictures, but since Karlovac is a small town, there's only one internet place and the computers are ancient....so the uploading is taking forever. Maybe I’ll just upload a few each week.
I’m gonna attach some Maribor pictures though. I think that's it for this week. Best of luck in all of your efforts and tasks at hand. Tell everyone I said hi and I’m doing fine....In fact I’m gonna be a stick when I come home because I’ve lost 7 pounds since being in the country....way too much walking...but the blisters healed, so I’m good.
Until next week,
Love,
P.J.
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