Week 93: The Court, Rain, Paperwork, and a Dream Catcher

Hello everyone! The weather here has been pretty darn warm, but we're surviving. I hope you are too ;)

So, the police office called us on Tuesday morning to tell me that my appointment with the court was set up. Don't worry, I'm not a criminal, I just needed to renew my visa. So, we went at the given time, sat around for a while, then went into a little room with one lady talking and the other typing. They told me that I needed to pay a lot of money. So, we took the little paper for that to the bank, pulled out some cash, and then payed them a lot of money. They even charged me $4 service fee because I was paying so much money. No, I couldn't do anything but pay it in cash.

Me and Sister Markinkovic

Anyway, when we got back to the little room with the two ladies, they took the proof that I payed the stuff, and then had me sign some stuff. Done. From there we went to the bus station to buy tickets to go to Zone Conference later in the week, and then after lunch and studies, went to the church for our Facebook work. Later on, right before English started, a young man in his mid-20s walked in to the church and basically asked us if he could learn more about the church, since the sign for our church caught his attention. I'm going to call him Victor, though that's not his name. Turns out he also plays piano really well. We set up a lesson with him for the next day, exchanged contact info, and then continued with ECG. Cool. After that while we were getting dinner at a nearby pizza place, Elder Christensen asked the Sisters how to say "Star Wars" in German. Their answer was "Krieg der Sterne" = "War of the Stars" of course, but then Elder Christensen accidentally repeated it back to them as "kriecht die Sterben" = "this death is crawling". The sisters had a hard time figuring out how to stop laughing. Also, while we were there, one of our friends from American Corner happened upon us and joined us, and ended up talking with Sister Marinković about her beliefs in God. It was pretty cool.

Wednesday started off with a trip to the police station to give them my passport so they can give my my new visa at some point soon. Around lunch time we had District Meeting at the Nields' place, and then Elder Christensen and I had a lesson scheduled with some guy. When we called him to confirm, he told us he wasn't in Novi Sad. Voll kühl, Bruder. Then we had language study instead of that lesson, and then went to our second lesson we had scheduled for that day. This one was with that guy that walked into the church on his own, "Victor". He did actually come. Just, an hour late. In any case, the lesson did go well, and he asked a lot of questions, which is usually a good sign. We set up for another lesson later in the week, and then the rest of the day wasn't very interesting.

Me and Elder Crapo, Heaton, and Christensen at Zone Conference

On Thursday we got up and almost went straight out the door to go catch our bus to go to Sremska Mitrovica for Zone Conference. The bus ride goes through Fruška Gora national park, as well as the town of Ruma, which are both pretty cool places. Zone conference was great as always, and it was awesome to get to see everyone. We heard some cool stories, a great lunch, good instruction, and a lot of photos. From there, a bunch of us had buses to catch, so we all went over to the bus station and sat around there together until our respective buses came. When Elder Christensen and I got back to Novi Sad again, we met up with the Sisters and the Nields for dinner, and we went to a restaurant called Gondola that apparently has "Asian Thursdays", so we got sushi, and it was really quite good.

This week we actually ended up having church cleaning on Friday morning, not Saturday. #plotTwist. When we finished with that, it was raining pretty hard, so Elder Christensen decided it was a good time to get our office work done that wee needed to do anyway. Right as we finished that, it stopped raining, and we got some Chinese food for lunch before going home for language study. That evening we had American Corner of course, and got to help local students practice their English. That one is always really fun.

Me and Sister Icke at Zone Conference

Saturday morning started off with another lesson with "Victor", but this time he showed up on time, haha. He's really cool. Asks good questions, and seems very willing to read the Book of Mormon and learn more. When we were done with that, we ran into the Melonakoses, since they were in town doing some interviews. After lunch, Elder Christensen and I made some phone calls trying to set up more lessons, but didn't get much, so then we went contacting. There's still a festival of sorts going on in the center of town, and so there are a lot of people over there all the time. It seems like some kind of food festival with booths that have food from various countries. One of the booths was from the USA, and it had corn dogs listed as one of our "national dishes". I love corn dogs. As we were contacting around, we also found a wedding, including a live band and people dancing the Kolo, a local traditional dance. As we stopped to watch some, a guy came up to us and started talking to us in perfect English. Turns out he's from the United States, and comes here to teach some exchange student type things. He was really friendly, and it was cool that he came up to talk to us. After that we went to the park to meet up with the sisters and have a joint language study before dinner.

Poster advertising American food.

Live band and people dancing the Kolo, a local traditional dance.

Yesterday, Sunday, was Novi Sad's branch conference, which means that a lot of leaders were here visiting from other cities, including the Melonakoses. I ended up doing a lot of translating (which I love) and ended up learning the word for matches (like, the thing you use to start a fire). The sisters performed a special musical number with Elder Christensen accompanying, and Sister Melonakos gave a wonderful testimony in Serbo-Croatian, right off the top of her head. It turns out that she's actually pretty darn good at speaking in these languages. After all of our meetings we had a big lunch together, and then did a bunch of paperwork-type stuff. Later on in the afternoon we heard that there was a big festival thing over the river at the Petrovaradin Fortress, and that our friends from American Corner had a booth there, so we went over to see if we could help them. One of the things they had set up was arts and crafts for kids to use to make dream catchers ("uhvatači snova"). I'll attach a photo of the one that I made using some leftovers, haha.

Handmade Dreamcatcher

Today started off again with some tennis with the Nields, the sisters, and one of our really promising investigators, and then getting lunch at our favorite burrito place, Tortilla Casa. Since then we've helped Elder Nield with some more paperwork things, emailed, etc. The typical P-day stuff.

Joseph Smith saw God the Father and Jesus Christ after he prayed about which church to join

Your homework this week is to read Joseph Smith - History, which tells the unfolding of the events that started the Restoration of God's church. It's quite a good one. Have a great week!

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Elder Ryan Echols
Adriatic North Mission
Svačićev Trg 3/1
HR-10000 Zagreb
Croatia