Spanish Exodus, Range Rovers and English-Romanian Conflict

Florin Marian, the guy from Spain (Cristiano Rinaldo’s neighbor) came to church after our lesson last week.  It was good to see him before his return to Spain.  I e-mailed Blair to hook him up with Madrid missionaries.

Pretty normal week, but we spent a lot of time in Bucuresti.  We went to Buc for P-day last week, spent time with other missionaries and ate some good food. 

We ended up going back to Buc on Wednesday to take care of Kennedy's visa.  We got there pretty early and while he took care of his things, I spent time running errands with the office Elders in their car.  It was so nice to sit and relax in a car for a few hours. When we met back up with everyone at the visa office, they had been there for three hours and we stayed another two hours. That same day was actually Kennedy’s birthday so we went to Ruby Tuesdays (the most American thing in Bucuresti other than the Hard Rock Cafe)

Zone conference was the next day, so we stayed the night in Bucuresti and hung out. I finally got to meet President Ivory and his family at zone conference.  My first thoughts were "success" and "money."  To better illustrate this, the first thing he did upon entering the country was buy his 2014 Range Rover.  He has made some big changes to the mission and just expects a lot more in general.  When I had my interview, I could tell that he was all business and no play.  I mentioned being in the same city for seven months and Ivory brought up how his daughter stayed in Rome Italy for nine months straight on her mission (pretty much saying suck it up)!  The problem is, Ploiesti simply does not compare to Rome - Haha!  Everyone told me he was intimidating, but I would better describe him as intense. 

The highlight of the week is on Saturday when one of our advanced English students went nuts.  His name is Nic and he loves to talk a lot. I guess one of the other students got sick of listening to him and asked that he allow the rest of the students to speak. After getting pretty heated, the sisters asked Nic to leave . . . he stood up, started cussing everyone out (in Romanian and English), spit on the student that first asked him to shut up, kicked a garbage can across the room and slammed all the doors on the way out. It was incredible!  If everyone wasn’t in shock, I probably would have laughed. 

Aside from a normal week, the other two Elders in our district leave this week so we’ll have big changes coming up!