May 10, 2010

Hi Family! I love you all so much and I LOVE hearing from you every week. It's way more fun than I thought it would be :)

Don't really know what to e-mail about because I talked to Mom and Dad yesterday, yay!, and MICHAEL! Thank you parents, because I was hoping that you'd think of that and you did!! So I told them everything and now my brain is mush. It's so fun getting updates about you guys, I'm SO happy to hear that Jude is doing well, I got pictures from Mom and he is so cute! AND I snuck a peak at everyone's blogs and my sisters children are the cutest group of kids EVER. I can't believe how old and cute they all are.

So--I have P-day on Mondays and my transfers come every 9 weeks, but I don't have a different p-day on those weeks like Michael does, so it's always on Mondays. Varaždin (var-uzh-deen) is a great little place, we walk everywhere and we live in a residential area, lots of families around, basically a cute little place. I always forget what size it is (pretty small but not a village or anything), because we see the same parts of it every day. Basically our house, the church, and center - the square with cobble-stone streets and shopping - and then wherever in our area we decide to go, which has so far been pretty close to our house, still. Meaning, we haven't ventured out too far. I hope that made sense. The church is nice, it's a rented building, but it feels like a church still. It also has a ping pong table and a games closet, so last p-day we hung out with the Elders and did a puzzle, and then on Friday or Saturday, I can't remember which, we went and played ping-pong as a branch activity. Everyone in the branch is pretty nice, we're going over to a family's house tonight for FHE. Vladimir (who was taught by one of my teachers in the MTC) and Daniela (who served a mission to London) and their daughter, who I can't remember the name of. And the other members that we've met are really nice, too. My companion is Sister Whitaker, she's from Pennsylvania, and we're getting along really well, we talk about books and movies and stuff and we've seen and read almost all the same things, so that's really fun. There are two Elders here, Elder Brown from somewhere outside of Logan, and Elder Nitta from Las Vegas. They are pretty funny. Food: I haven't tried a ton of new stuff, because we haven't eaten at a member's house yet. But I do really like the cereal here and my companion made polenta, which was good, I have no idea how to explain what it is. And all the brands of stuff are different, so the food has been good in that respect. We've found stuff that's close enough to American food that it doesn't seem like I'm eaten foreign food that much. Except there isn't cheddar cheese. And I keep looking at little kid clothes, because I thought it would be so cool to send the kids something Croatian, but all the clothes I've seen so far have English writing on them! So I'll keep looking and send something for Christmas. Also, the tie originated here in Croatia and they have really good tie stores, I haven't been to any yet, but I hear that they are very good and some are very expensive. But that's cool.

So, I hope everything goes well for Dad in Tokyo and for Olivia's appointments! And I hope that everyone is safe travelling around!

Love you all!

Keshia