Cursed Tracting Area

This week was great, I bought some new shoes so I had to suffer through the blisters of breaking them in for the first couple of days, but now it's all good, and I can walk again. Tracting was a lot of fun though, we had to take a break to find a żabka and find me some bandages. Then I sat down on a bench and bandaged up my feet like a Larry. It was a proud moment for me, I wish I had pictures, but I didn't think of it at the time.

We had Zone training this week, which meant that we didn't have district meeting, but we totally forgot about that and showed up at the chapel for district meeting on Tuesday. We decided to just have our own district meeting, since we hadn't been able to finish our studies anyway. Sis Allowitz was district Leader. The awkward thing was, the actual district leader, Elder Garrett showed up partway through and decided to stay for the language portion. It was fun though.

So Sis Allowitz's Uncle served a mission here in Poland about 12 years ago, and he served here in Katowice. When he left, he was so sure he'd come back to Kato that he left one of his suitcases with a member here. He did not return to Kato though and so the suitcase was lost to the ages. However, Last Monday Sis Allowitz received an email from her Uncle who told her Prez Urban had contacted him and told him that they found his suitcase. Sis Allowitz quickly volunteered to take it home for him, and called prez Urban to set up the exchange. Actually getting the suitcase turned out to be more of a hassle than we imagined. Prez Urban told sis Allowitz that he needed to explain something about the suitcase before she could get it. So in the days leading up to it we were totally wrapped up in the mystery of the thing, wondering what Prez Urban had to say about it and if Sis Allowitz's Uncle was a spy and all that... it turned out it was just that some of the stuff was missing, like some gloves and a scarf that Elder Remy had taken when the weather got cold, but it was still a fun mystery, and it's still a really cool coincidence.

We started tracting at this new location last week, and every time we've gone out there we end up having some kind of trouble. The first time we almost couldn't get a bus to take us home and would have been out way way late. The second time my feet were so damaged from blisters that I couldn't walk, and the third time sis Johnston had to go to the bathroom so badly that we had to pause our tracting to go find one. We are all convinced that the next time we go out there to tract something horrible is going to happen to sis Allowitz... she is terrified :) Anyway, we walked all over the place looking for a public restroom, or at least a McDonalds or somewhere she could pay to use or something. We were walking for like a half our and sis Johnston was starting too look at the bushes as the best option when sis Allowitz suddenly stopped this Pan (a Sir) and asked "Gdzie jest łazienki?" (where is the watercloset?) The Pan looked super confused, shook his head and walked away. We sadly turned and were about to walk across the street when the Pan turned around, one finger in the air, and came back with a look of determined resolution on his face. He came up to us and said "Toaleta, tak?" (the toilet, right?) Then gave us directions to a public toilet just a street away. Sis Johnston was so grateful, and it was a really nice public bathroom, we were all pleasantly surprised.

We had a fun whiteboard with the Elders this week. Elder Garrett is very musical, so he brought a guitar and decided to sing hymns. After a couple of minutes of absent mindedly humming along with him I decided to join him, and eventually Elder Garcia joined us as well. It was a lot of fun. It's funny how comfortable I've gotten with singing in front of people on my mission, it's a cool skill I didn't really expect to develop in Poland, but I'm glad I did.

We went to the Planetarium on Saturday with the branch for a branch activity. It was so cool! They played awesome music, remixes of classical music like the flower duet (I died laughing when it started because all I could think of was The IT Crowd) and Mr Sandman. It was a really cool story, it was about the astronomer Haweliusz and his wife Elżbieta. There were large chunks of it that I didn't understand, and I'm still not totally sure why they showed a big basket of lemons at one point. The whole planetarium was super ghetto though and made me think of Fallout the entire time, it was great!

On Sunday after church we went by a park and saw a war re-enactment. It was so cool! There were explosions all over and fake gunshots! They were driving Nazi motorcycles around and executing people, it was a fun time!

That's basically it for the week, today we are hoping to go to the Zoo, but it all depends on the weather. It was raining like crazy a few minutes ago, but it has since stopped and is now really sunny, so we'll see.

Kocham was!