RUSSIA & 3rd Trimester!!!!

WHEW! It's been like forever since I've updated my blog! I'm sorry, I've been so busy with everything, life has been crazy busy!

So I'll start off with Russia, because I'm sure that's where everyone wants to me start ;)

Friday February 22nd (Day 1) of our trip, we wake up to a snow storm happening outside. This causes some issues due to the fact that we are departing from Boston and not Providence, so we rush to get everyone together and hop on a train from Providence to Boston instead of having people drive us to the airport. We get through security and everything fine and have a few hours to wait now at the airport. I believe we got there around 4pm and our flight left at 7pm. Lucky for me, I brought the game of Catch Phrase which we all played for a while (it sure does come in handy when traveling with groups of people, I must say!). Our flight was only delayed by like 45min so we all get on the plane. There are 8 of us, 6 girls, a guy and my pastor. On our first flight which was set up 2 by 4 by 2 seating in the rows, we got 2 sets of 4 for seating which was great but we ended up sitting on the tarmac for 2-3 hours waiting our turn to leave. Then our flight was 6 hours long or so and we got to Amsterdam and missed our connection. Thankfully, praise God! that another flight was headed towards Moscow in a half hour and we were lucky to catch it. Now, flying out of Amsterdam is crazy because you have to go through security again! We made it into Moscow, and headed through customs. You were not allowed to speak or smile when handing your passport to the Russian official, my roommate, Allison, and I were the only 2 out of 8 that had not been to Russia before. We get through customs and hurry off to go find our bags. Someone had already picked up one of ours that we had to go steal back and then of course, Pastor Andy's bag never left Amsterdam and he was assured that it would be put on the next flight to Nizhny Novogard which was our destination city. A tour guide and driver and van picked us up and took us to this nice restaurant for dinner. It was like family style and there was a wedding reception going on as well. By the way, at this point, it is officially Saturday evening because Moscow is 8 hours ahead of RI and for you Idahoans, thats 10 hours and for you Californians, thats 11 hours! After dinner, we headed to the train station and got on an overnight train. We had sleeping cars that slept 4 people each. We got in and everyone pretty much crashed.

Sunday morning around 7am, we arrive in Nizhny and get picked up by our host family with a van and car, much to everyone in the van's delight (teehee), the van had no seats in the back and instead had dining chairs that were not bolted to the ground. This provided much entertainment. The 8 of us were staying at a church dorm/hostel with the 6 girls in 1 room and the 2 guys in the other. Sunday mainly consisted of us going to 2 different church services and having fellowship with youth there. It was a great start to the week!

The rest of the week, we visited various schools and a dorm to give presentations on what life in America is like and what college life in America is like. At the end of the presentation, students were allowed to ask us various questions and that was quite entertaining. Then we invited the students to a church party that we were going to have that Friday. Our main focus for the week was to establish a relationship between the students and the few churches there. Our interpreter also taught an English class and we made 2 special visits to that class and did some exercises and interacting with the students like acting out popular Russian phrases and English phrases, picking apart the meanings of crazy sayings and other fun language activities.

On Thursday, we made a special trip to a nearby town about 1-2 hours away. This town, that starts with a Z and sounds like Zavuljah (def not spelled that way though), was the town that the past years mission team had stayed in and there was a special church family there that was in the process of building a church and it was amazing to see what progress they had done on it!

Another activity we did a lot was that we had about 50 4 x 6 cards with pictures on them of like various landscapes, people settings, and other various life applying things on them and we had students pick out cards in answer to our questions and had them explain. This activity is called Solarium and opens up people to deeper conversations and leads conversations to talking about God. So this activity was pretty fun.

One student/woman that was about 32 or so had invited us to her "flat" for lunch one afternoon. So part of our group went. She lived in a town about 1-2 hours away by bus. She had a lovely lunch laid out for us with various salads and amazing desserts. She also made her own wine and "juices" and had us try her gooseberry juice. I'll tell you one thing, it wasn't juice! We all laughed about that for a while and it was an amazing cultural experience to see how someone would live. This woman lived alone which is unusual and she had a garden and grew most of her vegetables and pickled/canned them for the winter months.

Some of the funny things about Russia....? Well, first toilets are quite entertaining over there! You never know what you are going to get to use! Plus, you often times have to pay about 50 cents to get about 1 square of toilet paper to go in a hole! That's right! A hole! Another thing, public transportation. We mainly used this method to get around (pictures to come) and we would get on a bus and it was jam packed!!! Wall to wall people, no use holding on, we were squeezed in tight enough there! Everyday we ate most of our meals in the church kitchen with a older Russian lady. Since it is winter, most of our meals consisted of soup and then something else such as barley and beef or pasta and chicken or a salad. However, with every meal we ate tons and tons of cabbage, by the end of the trip, we were all cabbaged out!

The weather was not too bad, actually it was the first time anyone in my group really saw the ground in Russia since the snow was melting. It made everything really icy and several of us made good habits of falling! Yes, that would include me with my amazing ability of having no balance! I enjoyed providing entertainment though to my fellow friends and Russians!

One little problem we encounted in the middle of our trip was that one of our team members encounted a kidney stone problem and got to experience a Russian hospital (oh fun!!).

Friday evening, we took the overnight train back to Moscow and spent Saturday touring around Moscow with 3 missionaries, 1 of whom was from El Paso, Texas and another was from Las Cruces, New Mexico, places that I had just visited last year! We spent Saturday night at Hotel Cosmos which was a hotel built in 1979 for the French for when the Olympics came. It was a nice hotel.

It was pretty smooth traveling heading home and we didn't really have any problems, thankfully. Overall, the trip was amazing and I had a blast and I definitely learned a lot about myself and got a deeper understanding of the European lifestyle. There really aren't enough words to describe all the feelings that I got out of Russia.

Jet lag was entertaining to experience and definitely took a few days to get used to. I'm already almost done with my second week of my 3rd trimester at school. Time is just flying by like crazy! In my next posting (which will be this weekend, promise), I'll tell what classes I'm in and other things that have been happening in my life!

Hope everyone is doing well!