One more door!

In looking over our entry about our apartment we discovered that we left out the best door of all. It is the door on the right. When our landlady, Erika, was showing us the apartment I went to that door and thought I was going to the hallway that leads to the outside door which is the door on the left. I opened the door and was extremely surprised at what I saw.

It is a twenty foot drop to the garage, there is a ladder that we could use to get to the bottom if we ever had need to get out. Yes, that is a car that you can see on the right. We have no idea how they got the car in there. The door you can see at the bottom has some glass panes in it but the space outside to maneuver to get a car in the garage is small and it is lawn. Erika spoke something to me when I opened the door, I am sure it was don't take a step, or watch your step, or something along that line. We are pretty sure they don't have OSHA here or at least they don't know about Erika's door to get to her garage.

Speaking of doors:

When we came home from our meeting with the branch president on Kedd (Tuesday) we could not get our inside apartment door open. Steve is the master at opening doors so I was more than a little concerned. He went next door to get Erika and she came over and tried. We were glad it was the inside door because it was -0 outside and not real warm inside. Steve finally said a few words in Hungarian (jk) and got it to open then Erica wanted to take it apart. I, on the other hand, was thinking a new lock would be a good idea. I love the look on Steve's face as she is explaining in Hungarian "The Plan". He took it apart and she  moved some parts around and they got it back in but we are a little hesitant to lock our door from the outside. If we couldn't open it from the inside we always have the ladder to the garage!

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!

Our Humble Abode

We arrived in Soporn on Friday, January 27, 2012, It was smoggy all the way from Budapest and there is still a haze over the city so we have not seen the Alps yet but we love our town. Our apartment is part of a house that belongs to Erika. She is a member in the Soporn Branch. She speaks less English than we do Hungarian so we do a lot of sign language when the missionaries aren't around. I promised a tour of the home, it is really quite nice. In Soporn there are communist buildings left from the occupation of communists that are tall and gray and alike. The homes in our neighborhood are all different colors. I will get an outside picture when the air clears. Lets start in the living/dinning room. It is very roomy for the two of us and so far we have only had the three missionaries but this weekend we will give it the test.

The door on the left in our bedroom, the second door from the left is a shrine for her daughter that lives in London, she even has her stuffed animals on the back of the couch but she told us we can keep our luggage in there, the next door is a storage room that needs to be cleaned out but I will wait until I know more Hungarian before I tackle that one. The door on the right is the bathroom.

 This is how our wall was decorated, I love it!

This is our bed, it consists of two 4inch foam pads on ply wood, there are two heavy comforters and then a bed spread that covers both of them. The pillows are feather filled and big, queen size sheets cover both the pads. We are getting used to it and most nights we are too tired to care.

This is our big closet, we have found that a lot of our stuff can be folded.

This is where we hang our clothes, Steve was very kind and let me put all my stuff here but wait there is more.

This is a clothes rack in the storage room and it works great!

This is the bathroom with all the modern conveniences and even hot water now after a couple of days of quick showers. The toilet is the typical European style with the shelf. They save tons of water. The big thing is our washing machine and it will be featured in a future blog.

This is our cute kitchen, I feel like I am playing house when I cook in it but I accomplish almost all the things I did at home in a lot less space. I had 30 drawers at home and three here and I am forgetting what I am missing other than my bosch! Don't you love the lace curtains?

Here is our frig, it doesn't have to be very big since we seem to make it to Tesco everyday for something. The egg carton only holds 10 eggs and egg in Hungarian is tojas. The eggs are all brown here. There is milk and cherry, apple and pear juice on the door. Lots of juice here.

We are getting good at learning to cook with gas again, you will notice that there are no numbers on the knobs, I have finally figured out about what temperature to bake cookies and rolls.

The stove top acutally has a cover that comes down that we can use for counter space.

This is the study/computer room, we spend a lot of time in here reading and studying Hungarian, note how cute the curtains are and also the handsome guy at the computer.

Now you have seen it all, if anyone wants to visit we always have this room. 

Three days at the mission home!

We arrived at the airport in Budapest at 6:15, we couldn't believe that we finally made it. It is a small airport in comparison with others. We managed to get most of our luggage on a cart, yes where there is a will there is a way!

The very best part was to see Elder and Sister Bagozzi and Sister Smith. They brought two cars to get all of our stuff to the mission home. We rode with Elder Bagozzi for the 45 minute ride. When we arrived at the mission home we hauled our luggage to the third floor. Thank goodness for an elevator. There we met President Baughman and his wife. Their apartment was very nice and so were they. They took us up to the fourth floor where there were four beds in one room, a double bed in the other bedroom, When I say double bed it is two singles pushed together. She told us that the young elders think the single beds are better so we took that option. It wasn't until the third night that I discovered how uncomfortable the bed was. We freshened up and the Pres. and his wife took us to a cute little restaurant not far away from the mission home and close to some cool statues. I was too tired to take pictures so I will post more when we go back to get our visas. The good news bad news is that Hungarian food is very good. We had a good visit with them during the meal I think, we just hope we didn't say anything that should not have been said. We were so tired that anything could have been possible. We vaguely remember going to bed that night but  the shower the next morning was heavenly!

   The next morning Sister Baughman fixed us eggs and toast, the bread here is really really good. We met with the Bagozzi's and they told us how to be missionaries and then we met with Pres. Baughman and he gave us a letter and went over it telling us what he expected to happen in Sopron. We then walked three or four blocks to the mall where we learned how to use our debit card and we got our 1st Hugarian foriths. They told us that if we put our thumb over the last two zeros and divide by 2 then that is the dollar value.

We purchased a hair straightener, a blow dryer and a GPS, then we had lunch in a fun sandwich shop in the mall. Here is a picture of the ceiling of the mall with the animals hanging upside down. After a short nap we met Elder and Sister Gudgell, (she was a neighbor to my roommate Lana Baegger Barlow and emailed me a lot about stuff to bring), the senior single sister missionaries Sister Smith and Sister Hansen and the Bagozzi's and we all walked four blocks to the subway where we boarded two trains to go to a very yummy pizza, pasta, salad place called Vapiano's. They made our dish before our very eyes. I had sour cream chicken pasta, Steve went for the spice, very tasty.

Thursday the Pres. wanted us to stay and see a zone conference but it wasn't our zone. We fought hard to stay awake during these meetings but were able to enjoy a Subway sandwich for lunch(not quite the same as an American sub but close.) The pres. and wife and the Bagozzi's went to an embassy meeting and left us on our own. We thought about walking to another restaurant but I had a blister on my heal the size of a quarter (so much for Danko shoes and comfort) so we opted to stay in our apartment and eat the left over sandwich from the flight. With nothing to do we both got a little homesick so Steve put on a movie. He picked The Christmas Story. Ralphie in that movie looks a lot like our oldest grandson so that did not help my feelings about home. Sleep was hard to come by that night. The next day we packed the blue Opel and plugged in the GPS and headed for Sopron. It took us about 2 1/2 hours. The  GPS wasn't all that great but did tell us when we were over the speed limit and he/she spoke quite a bit. It was better than hearing recalculating! We haven't name the devise yet, we plan on giving it another chance since it took us to the wrong place when we were trying to find the branch house where the missionaries live. They walked to where we described and found us. They are three very nice guys. Elder Wright from Virginia, Elder Olsen from Twin Falls, Idaho and Elder Szabo from Hungary who is waiting for a visa to go to the Washington DC mission. They directed us to our apartment and we met our landlady, Erika, who a member of the branch. She served us a very delicious lunch of fruit soup, stuffed cabbabe and a tart dessert. Steve was telling her how to say his name in Hungarian and he said it was Isten which means God instead of Istven which is Stephen. The missionairies bowed down to him. We all had a great laugh. We are unpacked and still have some organization to do and next time we will post pictures of our humble abode. Life in Hungary is great!

We made it to Budapest!

I wanted to blog a little about our nine hour stay in Amsterdam, who would have thought we could entertain ourselves in such a place. It was a cute airport and we definitely knew we were in Holland without leaving the airport.

One of the tender mercies of the trip was that we needed to know if the mission office knew that we were coming eight hours later than the original flight plan so we needed to get on email to get their #. Since we were unable to bring any of children with us we were a little (ok a lot) concerned of how to do this. We found a place in the airport where there were some people using airport computers and their own. I must have had my normal "what do I do now" look when a guy looked up and said " Elder, where are you going"? It was Brother Nebeker, we forgot his 1st name but if he reads this he can post a comment. He was from American Fork and helped us get free internet for an 1/2 hour. Here is a picture of this very nice church member.

A little while later we were sprawled out on some reclining chairs when another guy came over and asked where we were going. It seems as if a missionary badge is a beacon and we will take that. His name was Brother Young and he is a brother to Dr. Young the dermatologist in Logan. He had lived with his brother while attending USU and had gone home to Portland for his dad's funeral. He was headed back to some country in the middle east to join his wife and two children and teach school.

We wandered around the airport and found a very European sandwich shop and had a sandwich and Fanta pop. I can't believe how bad I look in this picture but this was now 24 hours without sleep. It gets worse!

We fought over the camera to see who was going to sit in the teapot, just so you know I lost!

Hum, what else to do only two hours until boarding, how about some shopping?

yes, some wooden shoes will do, wait they are ceramic, oh well, who wants to wear them anyway?

slippers anyone?

Is there life after Amsterdam Airport? Yes, but not very much. Tune in for the next few days of journey to the mission.

we are almost there

We made it to Amsterdam an hour early only to find out that our wait will be eight hours instead of three. If it were summer we would go see some tulips. I fell asleep while they were telling us the airplane rules. We barely made our connection at JFK. Some people are really nice and some not so much. Dinner over the ocean was interesting with pureed squash over chicken. What we wouldn't give for a shower and a bed. It is 7:00 on Tuesday here and Monday 11:00 at home.

Five Days at the MTC

Wow!

What a great week at the MTC. We arrived on Monday morning after driving on snowy roads most of the way down to Provo. We wandered from station to station with 37 other couples learning the ins and outs of the place. We were alright with all we learned until we found out that we each needed two more shots. They were almost as painful as paying for them ($308) One of the best experience was when we attended the devotional where Elder Kevin Duncan of the Seventy's spoke. Before his talk the audience of 2000 sang "Called to Serve". It was an amazing sight to see so many young missionaries sing so loud and with such conviction.

We spent a lot of hours with four other couples in our district. Elders and Sisters Jenkins, Murray, Hamblin and Pugley are amazing missionaries and we had a lot of fun with them along with our great instructors Brother Chinn and Hawkes. We may have been more than they bargained for some days!

At night we would travel to Highland and stay with our good friends Rick and Denise Nydeggar. We had fun visiting with them and had the best meal at Thanksgiving Point. Starving to Full to one short hour and bed time treats every night! Better than the Hilton!

Friday we said goodbye to our new good friends who are going all over the world. Good luck to us all,.

Onward ever onward!