Year Mark!

This week was awesome! We had tons of fun, and saw so many miracles. First of all, it was my year mark, you might have been able to tell from the Subject line :) We had a lot of fun celebrating. The district all pitched in to get me a big pack of magic cards, which I've been having a lot of fun with. We also had a fun time celebrating with Elder Torres and Elder Jackson (it was Torres' year mark too)

We went to a cool Ukrainian restaurant on the Rynek. The food was really good, Sister McCleary and I both got little pots of meat and potatoes that were fantastic. Elder Torres got some kind of naleśniki, but Elder Jackson ignored all the advice I gave him and went for the cheapest thing on the menu, a soup, which he really didn't like. Then we went and got ice cream from a place called "Tra-la-la-la-la"... literally... It was packed in there, about a billion couples had all decided at that moment that they wanted ice cream, so we had to move through a sea of people to get to the counter to pay and basically force our way through a mosh pit to pick our flavors. There's a bit of a problem in Poland... no one knows how a line works... People stand literally pressed up against you when they are standing in line and you can get line-jumped by pani's in a moments notice if your not careful. At one point Torres and I were standing in line, and I could feel the couple behind us trying to edge their way in front of us, so I turned to Torres and said "Elder, assert your dominance in line!" He immediately took a step forward until he was basically pressed against the glass and we were able to go next. After that we went to to chapel so elder Torres could give me a copy of a song he had on his phone. While we were there Torres sat on a chair and it broke, so he proceeded to destroy what was left of the chair. It was very entertaining. Then later that night Sister McCleary and I burned my dictionary. It was the one they gave us in the MTC and I kept it with me all this time so I could burn it at my year mark, because it's terrible! And that's how I celebrated me year mark.

The rest of the week was pretty great too, we had lots of funny things happen and like I said earlier, we saw lots of cool miracles. For example, on Saturday we had nothing planned, so we were going to go out and just contact around for most of the day. But, in the morning Elder Torres called and asked if we had time to do a whiteboard. We said, sure why not. Because we decided to have that whiteboard we ended up taking the tram from our house, whereas we would have probably just walked if we'd been contacting, and while we were waiting for the tram a guy came up to us and asked us what our badges were about. His name was Igor (yes, Igor!) and we were able to talk to him the whole tram ride, and got off a stop early so we could invite him to church and get his number. He said he doesn't have a ton of time right now (he's a student) but he's super interested to learn more, and he's said he's got a friend who might be interested too.

The other awesome contact we had that day was Invisababcia! During the whiteboard sister McCleary and I were contacting together and at one point there was literally no one coming from any direction, when suddenly I heard sister McCleary said "Dzień dobry Pani" I turned and saw a tiny bacia (granny) standing in front of me, she had appeared literally out of nowhere but somehow sister McCleary had seen her. We talked to her for a while, gave her a book and invited her to church (we tried to set up with her but she had already wandered off saying multiple goodbye's "wszystkiego najlepszego, do widzenia, do zobaczenia, pa!" before I'd finished getting the words out. But she was super cute, she kept complimenting me and Sister McCleary on our Polish, and when she found out that we teach ourselves the language she freaked out, it was hilarious!

Yesterday was awesome too, we had a mega lesson session at Adam and Agnieszka's house. Adam has been investigating the church for about 23 years, and Agnieszka in one of the members here. we go over to their house pretty regularly for lesson, and to help them with English, and they help us with Polish. Last night we went over and had a lesson about the word of wisdom, there were parts of it Adam didn't understand, and Agnieszka wanted some clarification for using wine in cooking and coke, etc. After our lesson with them we had a lesson scheduled over the phone with our Ania, our investigator who lives 2 hours outside Wrocław (you might remember her from my emails last time I was in Wrocław, she was the one who randomly showed up to church one day, she's still super interested, but doesn't have the funds to travel to Wrocław very often) We asked Agnieszka if she would be on the lesson with us for Ania, and she agreed. So we had an awesome lesson with her. We were really thankful to have Agnieszka with us on the lesson, it's sometimes really hard to understand Ania over the phone, which is a bummer because we can only ever talk to her over the phone! After that we continued our lesson with Adam and Agnieszka a little more. It was crazy, but tons of fun.

We had so many funny things happen while we were with Adam and Agnieszka. They told us about the giant statue of Christ in Poland, which is even bigger than the one in Rio de janiero. Except that the one in Rio watches over the city, and the one in Poland watches over a Tesco. Also, the Polish people call the statue Godzilla, lol.

They also told us how lost of Catholic Poles believe that being catholic = being Polish, and they told a story about how an old Polish man once told a reporter that Jesus was a Jew before he got baptised, and after his baptism, what was he? he was Polish, lol!

Also, there were a few times during the lesson with Ania where I wrote to Agnieska on a piece of paper to make sure I was understanding what Ania was saying. After the lesson Agnieszka looked at what I wrote and, laughing, said it looked "jak kura pazurem" (like chicken scratch) we all died laughing. You all thought my handwriting was bad before, well it's only gotten worse since i left, the influence of Poles and their terrible handwriting has destroyed anything that was recognisable in my writing. Sister McCleary often jokes that she needs a Urim and Thumim to read my notes.

There was also a funny moment when we found out that it was chocolate day yesterday. Sister McCleary is allergic to chocolate, and Adam and Agnieszka are well aware, they always remember to put out some kind of snack that doesn't have cocoa in it when we come over. Well, we found out during the lesson because Cindy Call sent us a text telling us it was chocolate day. When Sister McCleary read that, Agnieszka looked at her and just busted out laughing, it was so funny.

Oh, another cool thing that happened, Church was absolutely packed yesterday. We had tons of visitors because the Edgrens came with one of their sons and his whole family. It was really cool to see so many people in church. We almost didn't have enough water for the sacrament.

That's basically it for the week, it was so great.

Kocham was