Missionary Service of Elder Benjamin Moore: Week 6: Quiet Study Spot & Photos

Hello Family!

Well I've only got 2 weeks and a little bit left here at the MTC, and I'm getting excited to leave! We should get our travel plans to Novosibirsk within the next week and a half or so. The last group to go to Novosibirsk had a direct flight from SLC to Moscow, then a long layover before flying to Novosibirsk. Rumor is that up until a couple of years ago, the church used to put the missionaries on a train from Moscow to Novo. Yeah, that'd be the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Which would be about a 36-ish hour train ride. Luckily we fly now! And lucky for me, I'm in either the biggest or the second biggest mission in the world so train rides in between areas can be 12+ hours long. In the trains there are little compartments called Coupes ((sp?) rhymes with touche) that basically have 2 benches with beds above them and the benches also become beds when you roll out the bed roll onto them! So I'm preparing myself for some nice (maybe not as nice as Swiss trains though...) and long train rides.

This week in our classes we talked about the food a little bit. I'm really excited for the Russian food and I think it will be really good! Good bread, I hear borsch is the bomb, and Brat Mansfield said that the dumpling things with meat inside are really good. So basically a lot of meat and bread and potato-based things. The borsch is a beat root soup which is red and usually has some sort of meat in it? I'll be able to let you know more once I'm actually in Russia.

Our "investigator" Cvetlana is getting baptized on Saturday!

Umm, other than that...not much is new!

The Salt Lake Tribune put out an article about the MTC the other day which is pretty accurate.

We spend 10-12 hours a day learning the language or studying gospel principles. The rest of my life is spent eating or sleeping. :D

This week Elder Louis, Allen Stucki and I found a nifty little secret spot for studying! I'll send pictures when I go get my camera from the residence hall.

As far as the residence halls in the MTC go, there are only 4 beds in our rooms which is nice! Most rooms have 6 because of the increased number of missionaries. There are 6 showers to accommodate about 50 elders. Who all wake up at 6:30 a.m....and all go to bed at 9:00 p.m. So as soon as the alarm goes off I like to snag a shower before the line gets long. Sometimes I'll walk out of the shower with 10 elders waiting to get in. To make it better, three of the showers were broken for the last week. I guess that the Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian missionaries are being moved to the Raintree Apartments some time in August...right after I leave. Which is nice.

Dad said to :

Talk about the food in the MTC; your NEW DRESS STANDARDS!!! (Khaki's, no suits, etc.). Are the girls more colorful now???

Food at the MTC: it's not as bad as people say it is! For dishing out over 10,000 meals a day, they do a really good job! It's cafeteria food so there are some good meals and some meals where you just eat cereal instead. We have BYU Creamery ice cream every Wednesday and Sunday which I don't usually eat anyways. Lunch and dinner time is also when we get the mail! The District Leader, no longer me, picks it up right before we eat. They have a wrap bar pretty much every day which is just like the LT wrap place in the Cougareat (on BYU Campus). They've also got the BYU creamery milk, and bagels.

So yeah! the new dress standards. Nice to know I can have a gray suit! So Dad, when you come to Utah you're welcome to go to Mr. Mac's who still have my sizes! and pick me up a gray suit. :P I probably wouldn't have worn the khakis anyways. But besides being able to wear gray and lighter colored suits, and khakis, not much has changed. There is a whole web page about it. Oh, and you can wear closed-toed sandals too...whatever that means. Like Crocs? I don't know. I'm just excited to get to Russia to get some fuzzy hats, pointy black shoes, and find a Babushka to make me something awesome! One of the teachers here at the MTC who went to the Baltics mission got his Russian Triple re-covered by a babushka. I guess she had a little shop in the town and covered books. But it's really nice and has a map of his mission, mission name, and the flags of the three countries in his mission. The dress standards didn't really change for the Sisters, but they're allowed to wear pretty much whatever you wear to church.

So in my mission there is Novosibirsk and the few other Russian cities and then there are two cities in Kazakhstan as well. About a week ago, we ran into a Sister from Kazakhstan. She grew up in an orphanage near one of the cities in my mission. She is going Russian-speaking to Washington, Seattle. She gave us the name of the orphanage and city that she's from so if I've ever in the area! I can use my first referral!

That's about it for this week!

Elder Moore

P.S. I can still get Dear Elders up until August 5th! (Hint, Hint!)

Pictures!

And the map on the board is Ukraine and Russia. Not to scale and not in the right place. Elder Lewis outlined Russia and we colored it in, Elder Stucki outlined Ukraine and I colored it in.