Week 22 through 25 – Happy Holidays

January 12, 2023

A LOT has happened since my last update… my bad. I’ve been just about everywhere the past few weeks!

Last time I mentioned my new companion, Elder Warnock. He is awesome!

We play chess, enjoy baking bread, and solving puzzles together.

The day after Elder Warnock got here, I got really sick. Elder School had it before me, and I caught it just as he was leaving. It took me out for a few days, but thankfully I recovered thanks to some Honey Lemon Ginger tea.

Actually, I’m just kidding because we found out that I am allergic to Bulgarian honey. I drank the concoction, and it came back up. Not a pleasant week for me.

We had our last round of Christmas canvasing with the new district, and then we went to Christmas markets in the Glav. It was awesome!

So many cool shops and neat Bulgarian Christmas foods.

Later that day we had fun helping the Branch set up decorations in the building.

The next day was the Branch Christmas concert. Parts of the concert weren’t perfectly orchestrated, and I felt frustrated at the time. We were asked to help at the last minute and we were happy to help, it just would have been better if they told us beforehand so we could prepare.

As I was sitting there though, listening to our Ukrainian Family beautifully sing O Holy Night, a sudden peace washed over me. The rest of the concert was really enjoyable and I felt the Savior’s love for these people I was serving. After the concert we got some things figured out and everything worked out. I just needed to take some time and realize that we are all doing the best we can, with how few members there are.

The whole point of this concert was to worship our Savior, and what a beautiful concert it was. The lesson here was clear to me, and we made it one of our branch goals for the year to communicate better with each other.

On Christmas eve we were just minding our business, when we were suddenly disrupted by the sound of thousands of motorcyclists dressed up as Santas rumbling down our street.

There were so many, the ground literally shook, and we live on the top floor.

It was so funny!

The next day was Christmas, we had an amazing service, and had great church attendance. It was really nice.

Immediately following, we had to catch a train to… Burgas! We got to spend the rest of our Christmas with other missionaries. It was so much fun.

The black sea was such a cool place!

We saw Jellyfish,

Elder Warnock napped on the beach,

and we saw various seagulls.

The beach was a delight to visit.

The city was also decked out in lights, it was super cool!

We headed home on Tuesday that week, and prepared ourselves for Bulgarian New years.

New Year was insane!

We had a mandatory curfew imposed to keep us safe. Bulgarians party hard!

There were no less than 20 different firework shows going off at any given time.

One of them went off right by our apartment! It scared the heck out of me.

All night long, it sounded like a war zone.

We had a really nice meeting on Zoom with the whole mission, where we learned who our new mission president will be!

President Koivisto will head home in about 6 months in June, and will be replaced by President Auaras! He’s from Germany, and we are all really excited for him to come.

However we are really sad that the Koivistos will be headed home.