So I have a story for everyone first. One day in November, Elder Lyman was
tracting on his birthday. He tracted into a super nice lady who happened to
know the curator of a museum in Celje. When she found out that the only day we
have to go to museums as missionaries is on Monday (the one day of the week that
every museum in Slovenia is closed), she gave us the curator's number. The
curator opened the museum for us on Monday, and gave us a tour of Celje's
underground museum. This morning I saw an ancient Roman road, cool Roman
statues, and artifacts from the Celjski Grofje, or the famous Counts of Celje.
I learned that there's a temple of Hercules on the hill across the river, a
Roman Necropolis in Lava (an area in Celje), there was an old basilica where the
post office is, and that the main road of the Roman city of Celje is the one
Kišori lives on. Just down the street from me, they're also doing construction
on the road, and it's halted because they found MORE Roman ruins and they're
currently excavating. SUPER cool!!
Okay, now that my little nerd moment is over, here's how the week has been.
:)
Zone conference was on Tuesday, and it was one of the most interesting ones
I've had. It was all in Slovene! Only none of us knew it would be, which was
unfortunate since Sister Flanders and I were teaching at it. President and
Sister Rowe, as well as the APs, don't speak Slovene, but whenever a Slovene
missionary was speaking, it was in the langauge. It was really cool!
After the meeting, we also had a great surprise. The Ljubljana members had
made us a TON of traditional Slovene food as a surprise to show how much they
appreciated the missionaries. It was delicious! The members here are wonderful
:) I don't remember all of the names, but they made things like kranjska
klobasa, štruklji, prekmurska gibanja, and potica. See if you can find any of
the recipes online! They're pretty great!
We had another exchange this week, this time with Ljubljana. I was in
Celje with Sister Brown, the newest sister. It was fun! She has a really
strong desire to learn the language, and we did really well with SYL. We spoke
in Slovene pretty much the whole day! We also had an interesting contacting
experience. I stopped a woman on the street, just by asking how she was doing.
She stopped and said, "Slabo!" (bad). She then started talking about how she
lives alone, her sister is super sick, she lost a child, and all sorts of other
things that had happened to her. She was practically in tears at a few points!
We gave her a Book of Mormon and told her that it could help her, and she gave
us her phone number. Hopefully sometime soon we can meet with her and help her
find comfort!
On Friday, we had a few "door miracles" that were pretty cool. Friday was
Miklavž (St. Nicholas Day), and we decided to do something for an inactive
family. We bought copati (Slovene slippers) for all of them, and stuffed them
with candy. We ran to their apartment in the morning during exercise time, well
aware that the blok would be locked and we would have to get lucky or wake
someone up by buzzing their apartment. Within a few minutes of being at the
blok, someone came outside and we managed to get in! We met with the family
later that day, and Milena (the mom) was wearing her new copati. She definitely
suspected us, but we played ignorant Americans who don't celebrate Miklavž, and
I think she bought it :)
We also miraculously got let into a blok where another inactive lives.
There's no way to get into his blok without a key--there aren't any buzzers.
We waited outside for a while, and someone came down. When Sister Flanders
started going in, she literally got dragged from the door! The lady who had
opened it said she wouldn't let us in, because she wouldn't want her neighbors
letting other people in. She did, however, let us into where the mailboxes were
(we were there to deliver a book to the inactive, so we could have put it in the
mailbox). While we were debating whether to just leave our excuse to visit the
member in his mailbox, someone else came up and the door didn't close behind
him! We were able to get up to the apartment and deliver the book. The member
was super nice, too! He looked really sad, said he would let us in if he had a
bigger room (which was okay, since we wouldn't be allowed to go in alone
anyway), and said he'd come to church some Sunday.
I think that's all for this week. Until next week! Čao!
Sestra Erin Jones
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