Starting the New Year

Sziasztok!

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Last week was really cool. At least one crazy thing happened that I can remember. The handlebars on my bike came loose and started to jiggle a little bit, but I didn't pay much attention to it. (You can probably guess the rest of the story already!) Well, last Wednesday Elder Smith and I were riding home to get some stuff before going to a member's house and as we were turning a corner my steering failed. I turned my handlebars, but nothing happened. I looked down and saw that my front wheel hadn’t turned; then I looked up and watched helplessly as I ran into Elder Smith’s bike. We collided, but somehow managed to stay on our feet! I got my pants all muddy from the street and I broke one of the spokes off of the front tire, but fortunately nothing worse happened. At this point, I thought the worst of my bike saga was over, but my day just got better! We walked our bikes home and picked up the stuff we needed before going to the member’s house. My bike was not ridable, but fortunately, we had an extra! Unfortunately, one of its pedals was broken off. I put the pedal back in place as best I could and rode off to the member’s house. That trip was a lot of fun! Every five to ten rotations the pedal would come loose again and I’d have to tap it back in with my foot—a really tricky maneuver! The pedal fell off a few times so I had to coast back to where it dropped, pick it up, and stick it back on. That was quite the bike ride! Later on Elder Smith and I went to Tesco (Europe’s version of Walmart) and bought some tools to fix the first bike. And now everything is great!

New Year’s Day was pretty cool. For language study I watched a part of The Prince of Egypt in Hungarian and wrote down the words I couldn’t understand. Singing is almost impossible to understand! And really fast talking too. But watching movies in Hungarian is a ton of fun. I don’t understand every word, but enough to get the main points and to enjoy the movie. On New Year’s eve there were tons of fireworks. I don’t know if they are legal here or not, but everyone loves them and sets them off. It felt like the 4th of July at home!

Our investigator, Sándor, is doing well. We are going to start meeting with his wife and daughter now! Awesome! We recently watched the Restoration video with them—the audio is finally in Hungarian! It was great.

Well I need to go now, I hope that everyone had a wonderful holiday and will enjoy going back to work and school! Whoooo!

~Anderson elder