First Week in Sopron is now history

Wow, we have been here a week in our new town. We certainly had a lot of firsts. I taught my 1st piano lesson in many years to a sister in the branch who is only a year older than me. We do not do well in guessing how old people are here because they look so much older than they are. Zsuzsa is a quiet refined sister who is trying to learn to play the piano so they do not have to rely on missionaries. I ended up numbering my fingers from 1 to 5 so I could communicate, I wanted to write on her hands but since it was our first meeting I refrained. She was the 1st person baptized in Soporn in June of 2001 since that time there have only been 76 others. She also served a mission in Germany. Most of the church members are sisters and we have met several who are single. Yesterday there was only one in primary again but it was a different one than last week. Here is a picture of our egyhaz (church house)

The 1st floor is actually the 0 floor here and it is just an entry way, the 1st floor is a bank which is just open once in a while (maybe when they have money). The 2nd floor is the chapel which is really just a room with a pulpit and piano and a small room with a copy machine. The 3rd floor has the Relief Society Room, with a very small kitchen, when I say small I mean like a closet, it has two hot plates, a sink and dishwasher and a microwave and one cupboard. Another room off the RS room is the primary. It never gets too loud for the RS lesson with just one child. The teenagers meet in the room off the chapel where the copier is. There were three there Sunday. It all works except older people have a hard time climbing all the stairs. They are working on putting an elevator in. One sister is in a wheel chair so that will help. The missionaries live on the 4th floor, you can see the pointed roof. I haven't been up there yet but Elder Flammer has. We doing apartment checks every six weeks so I will see it soon.

This is the front door of the egyhaz. There is a pegseg (bakery) next door. Lucky the smells don't penetrate the building on fast Sunday. The building is actually part of a hotel and they had a baptism in there hot tub in November. They had to rent it but they fix anything that goes wrong in the church.

Steve taught his German and English class Thursday night. The guy standing next to the balloons on the right was in his English class. The younger elders are having some success with getting investigators from these classes. Thomas was rather serious in the class and hardly smiled as Steve told his "see these hands see these lips" story but he agreed to come the the branch party on Friday. He seemed to have a really great time.We had some of these people to our home on Saturday night for homemade pizza.

I had to post this picture. Last Saturday Steve and I were making pizza and we heard this song that sounded like an ice cream truck. We knew that it couldn't be that because it was 8 degrees outside and the chill factor was 2 degrees, but we looked out the window lo and behold it was truly an ice cream truck. I bet he didn't even have to run his refrigeration unit.

Since our refrigerator is so small we put the pop outside to keep cold before the pizza party. They all came an hour late and it was still frozen. Elder Szabo really wanted this drink. He finally cut off the top and it was all gone by the time everyone left. We hadn't planned on serving slush but what ever works.

We needed nutmeg to make snickerdoodles for the branch party and we didn't know how to say nutmeg, Did I mention that we left our Hugarian/English dictionary home and we haven't found one here yet? As you can see the spices come in packages like taco seasoning at home. We took our chances and lucked out. They say that one should not push his luck. Today we took the missionaries to lunch before we did our grocery shopping. We had noticed a little restaurant inside Tesco and we decided to try it. They had four microwaves that they used to heat up the soup and entrees. We all had the lunch special which was soup, a meat dishes and our choice of paprika potatoes, noodles or rice. Steve was smart enough to get the potatoes and chinese chicken but I decided to try the beef. It had the worst texture ever and I wondered what they fed their livestock here and the taste was even more strange. The Hungarian Elder told me it was chicken hearts. I cannot believe that 12 chickens gave their hearts for that meal. One was plenty. It is still an amazing place to be!