zacusca bread (zacusca is like salsa that you spread on bread. It's super good), mint lemonade, and a homemade ciorba (a soup which is mainly vegetables, and in this case all vegetables)
me making whipped cream by putting cream in a container with coins (clean coins) and shaking it for a long time over the sink so that all the stuff leaking out wouldn't fall on the floor.
Michael also had to make sweetened condensed milk from scratch for his cake. Wow, they sure do learn how to cook on their missions!
our three cakes at the party
some of the members at the birthday party
Half eaten tres leches cake
me with Costel, a member who is also a model
It's the end of the beginning! I've now stayed two transfers in Deva, and I am leaving my trainer here and moving to... Craiova! It's a city more in the southern part of Romania, still on the West side. I've heard it's very beautiful around there, and I'm super excited! My companion will be Elder Kopsa, an American missionary who has been here for 10 or so transfers and is the District Leader in Craiova. The one thing that scares me about Craiova is the historical past tense. Basically there are several types of past tense in Romanian. Past and Plu-perfect past are the most common. Past is used for things that happened sometime in the past, but happened at one time, and are uninterruptable such as "I broke my leg" or "I jumped over the stick" and other similar sentences. Plu-Perfect past is used for things in the past that happened over a period of time, and are interruptable. For example, "I was writing a letter" or "I was at the store" or "I was sleeping" or other similar things. Plu-perfect past tense is used in every city of Romania and Moldova to describe these things for anytime in the past. In Craiova, however, they use what we call "Historical past tense" which is a completely new tense, only used in Craiova, which I haven't learned, because it's only used in Craiova, and which is used in place of Plu-perfect past tense for anything that was happening in the last 24 hours. For example, if I want to say that I slept last night, I have to say "I was sleeping (in the last 24 hours)" rather than "I was sleeping." Oh Craiova. I'll let you know how that's going next week.
This was a great last week in Deva! We had a lot of lessons with members, recent converts, and less active members, and we also had two lessons with two cool boys named Alex and Nicu. Alex and Nicu are awesome. We met their friend Sami in the park, and set up to meet with him a few weeks ago. He came and brounght two friends: Joni and Alex. Later we met with Sami and Joni, who also brought his friend Iulia. But what happened to Alex? We called him on Tuesday night, wondering if he just didn't want to meet and he said he wanted to meet us the next day! So, we met with him on Wednesday. To our great surprise, he brought his friend Nicu! We gave them a short lesson about why the Book of Mormon is important to us, and why the restoration is so important to everyone, and assigned them to read the first chapter of first Nephi. We met again Friday to find out that they had both read the first chapter... and then some. Nicu read two chapters I think, and Alex was talking about the Tree of Life at one point, so he at least skimmed through chapter 8. They also watched the Joseph Smith movie with us and afterward asked why Joseph Smith's dad had to be baptized if he had already been baptized. So we explained authority and they both said that if they receive answers to their prayers and find out the Church is true they want to be baptized! It was great and I'm excited for them. They're both 17 years old and they are both really smart. It was a great lesson.
We also had a birthday party for Elder Hyatt! We had three cakes (because it was also Fratele Fotea's birthday), and they were all really good. I made one of them, a Tres Leches cake, which is very un-Romanian, so the members liked eating a cake that was so different. It was a great way to say goodbye to all of the members here in Deva.
Winter is definitely coming. We started last week in short sleeve shirts and ended in suits with sweaters, and today we're wearing coats. I don't know what the weather is like for all of you, but you should probably get ready for winter, because I don't want you to freeze. Yeah, that means you.
Anyway, I hope all of you are doing well, and I'll send another email next week from Craiova!
Vă iubesc și să vă trăiască copiii și rudele, Elder Michael Abbott
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