The Week Where Everything That Could Have Happened, Happened... Except a Baptism...

This week I want to start off with a lovely story about my companion. So, yesterday Sister McCleary got up in sacrament meeting and bore her testimony about Lord of the Rings, likening it to the gospel :) ... it... was... awesome. Oh, and I should probably also mention that this sacrament meeting consisted of only the missionaries. I'll explain. This week was district conference, which meant that all the members went to Katowice for church, but, because Wrocław is so far from Katowice (I guess that's the reason) we missionaries can't go unless we have an investigator going, and none of our investigators could make it... So, all six of us stayed in Wrocław and held our own sacrament meeting. It was great, and really entertaining.

Elder Wynne was presiding, so he chose Elder Jackson to conduct, which was his first mistake. Jackson quickly went mad with power and announced randomly that Elders Wynne and Remy would perform a musical number for us, and that they would sing popcorn popping. Wynne said sadly that once it was announced it had to happen, so they sang popcorn popping, and then announced that all the elders would perform another musical number, Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief... all 7 verses. After that, Elder Jackson got up again, and, exercising his last bit of power, told us all that Sister McCleary would be giving us a talk on Lord of the Rings and the gospel. It was great, she came up with the whole thing on the spot and it was actually really beautiful. She focused mostly on the two towers and quoted Sam's speech to Frodo, Elder Remy was crying the whole time, it was awesome.

That was Sunday, and it was great, the rest of the week was not so great. We saw a lot of cool things, had a lot of prayers answered and even had quite a few laughs, but it was just a stressful week. We had to plan for several things that then didn't end up happening. We were going to have a baptism, very short notice, we got everything ready, invited a bunch of people, and then, unfortunately, some stuff happened, and we had to postpone it. We aso had zone conference, which is normally in Katowice, but at the last second was changed to Kraków. Kraków is a lovely city, I've been there a couple of times on exchanges, but it is really far from Wrocław so in order to get there on time for Zone Training we had to take a train at 5:52 in the morning. That was a pretty crazy morning too, we woke up at about 3:50 got ready to go, and stepped out the door of our building to see the tram that we absolutely had to catch, pass us. So we both had to sprint to the tram stop (which is like 2 blocks away) to catch this tram. We caught it, thankfully, but after a few minutes on the tram we realised we'd forgotten our phone.

Other than that, zone training was pretty fun. We got to hang out with all the missionaries from Katowice, Kraków, and Kielce and eat good food. The talks were all great, and we got to walk through the rynek on the way back to the Dworzec, which is always fun, the Kraków rynek is beautiful. And on the train ride to and from Kraków Elders Wynne, Remy, and Torres, and I all played Magic, a lot, it was fun.

Sister McCleary had this to say about the talk the APs gave at Zone Conference, and I thought it was funny so I'm just going to paste it in - "It was great trying to watch Elder Retallick try to use baseball as an metaphor for life. It was funny, he was trying to use batters and strikes and he did really well until he got to the name of the batter. He was like "...the one who holds the bat- do you have a special name for them?" All of the other missionaries were American, except Elder Weggerson, but he's not important here, said together "Batter." Elder Retallick rolled his eyes and said "oh, wow." then went on with his lecture, it was hilarious! I love Brits, they think they know everything!"

On Friday we had a fun lesson with one of our members here, Agnieszka, and her husband, Adam, who has been investigating the church for about 23 years. While we were there Dainel, their son, was playing with legos and kept insisting that his parents help him. Finally they agreed to help so he ran back and forth bringing shirt-fulls of Legos into the kitchen and dumping them on the table in front of us. After he was done Agnieszka looked at us and basically said, "you two can build the house, right?" so we got to play with legos during our lesson, it was fantastic. I'll admit I got a little carried away toward the end, I gave the house a facade with a rose window. Then I found a few lego guys, some fire, and guns and put together a scene. I barricaded the door with wooden boxes and a dresser, then put a guy inside the house with two guns and a dog. And on the outside I put fire around the wooden boxes and three guys holding guns, one of them was also holding a gas can. And then I put one guy sneaking around the back of the house to the back window. It was funny to see Sister McCleary, Agnieszka and and Adam all slowly realise what I was building. But the best part was that once Agnieszka realised what I was doing she started helping me. She built a tree and put little flames all over it too then put it right up against the house, lol, it was so funny.

Sister McCleary had several meltdowns this week, it was very entertaining, I videotaped several of them :) During her meltdowns she would sometimes tell me random facts about animals, or pumpkin seeds, so it became fun for me to mess with her during these times by shooting her with rubber bands. However, it was dangerous to do that when she was holding her Polish Stick of Power. She whacked me good with it once, (It was an instinctive reaction) gave me a nasty welt on my leg, lol. We had a lot of rubber band wars this week, we found a huge bag of them in the chapel and learned that it's a lot of fun to shoot each other with them randomly, and also to shoot I'm a Mormon cards at each other. The cards hurt a lot more that the rubber bands, but we want to get good enough with them that we can shoot them through open car windows.

Well, I think that's pretty much it for the week. It was kind of tough just because we had so many things change on us, and fall through, but it was still pretty good, Sister McCleary and I are good about finding fun it all situations.

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