First week in Bulgaria

Dear Family and Friends,

We have been here for 9 days and are making our way around the place. Our home is on a hill in the center of the city (600,000+ pop.) and the road to get there is very winding and narrow. We thought the driving in Riga was crazy but here it is much worse. And parking is strickly by luck. This is the narrow road to our place. It is worse than it looks, it is a joke when another car is coming our way. One of us has to pull over onto the curb/walkway/parking area. Pedestrians beware.

We spent the first week going through the masive amount of files that the previous couple had left for us. We feel that we know what is going on and are ready to start our work. We plan on starting visiting the branch seminary and institute classes this week and will be on the road for 5 days visiting 4 of the classes in one of the districts. This is the fun part of the work; getting to know the youth and ysa and their teachers. We visited the Plovdiv branch Wednesday and had a wonderful visit. The teacher, Ivan Baev, is an excellent teacher and has a wonderful relationship with his class. The only problem: there are no seminary students, only YSA. This is Ivan below in front of the only chapel built by the church in Bulgaria.

We work with a wonderful group of missionaries. Our first district meeting was just 3 days after arriving in Plovdiv. To our surprise, Elder Orton was aware of our coming as his aunt is the R.S. Pres. in our St. George ward. He is a great missionary as are they all. The sisters took us shopping on Tuesday, so we fed them lunch. Shopping in Bulgaria will not be as intimidating as it was in Latvia, our first mission. Many of the products are the same or similar. We just have to figure out a few items such as sour cream. Thankfully our apartment has all the spices we need. Peanut butter may be a problem here where it wasn't so much in Latvia. I kind of wish we had taken up Elder Gregory's suggestion in Latvia and learned a bit of Russian, then we would not have had any problems with pronouncing the Bulgarian words. I think the best way for us to learn any of the language here is to concentrate on the Hymns. This way we will learn the pronounciation and a few of the words.

Our computer is a good one, but the internet would not come up. We tried all we knew how to do so we called on the real experts, the Elders. Elders Ingebretson and New came over to get our internet working on Wednesday, so we fed them dinner. We know how to win their hearts. The other missionaries in Plovdiv are Elder Griffith and Orton. We had 2 others at our district meeting, but they live in a town 20 km away. So I guess we will only see Elders Marianno and Wooley on Mondays and when we visit the sem/inst. class.

Sister Larkin and Sister Thompson with Sister Andersen in our apartment

Elders Orton, Andersen, New, Ingebretsen, Griffith, Woolley, and Marianno; Sisters Larkin and Thompson