A Busy Week

Monday, we had family home evening with the Gibbons, Simon (he in charge of buildings) and the Pages (he is our OGC). We had pizza and played games. We had some adventure getting out there. President Gibbons picked us up at a metro station sort of near his house, but not until we had already gone to the wrong metro stop. The name of the station is Tushinskaya, the stop before is schuskinskaya. Both are spelled exactly the same except that one starts with a T in the russian version and the other does not. We didn't think we heard the T sound, but thought we just missed it with all of the noise of the metro, so off we went looking for a McDonalds and a flower shop. We found these two landmarks not particularly helpful, since there is a McDonalds at nearly every metro and flower shops galore!! We will be more careful next time. The good news is that we were about 30 minutes early to begin with and ended up being just in time!!

On Wednesday, we went to the symphony. I can't tell you what we heard or who conducted it, but it was lots of fun. The music had a lot of energy and the conductor was quite a personality. The Gibbons came to our house for dinner before the theater. It was there first time to see our apartment.

Today, we made final preparations for Christmas gifts to all of the emplyoyees in our office (9) and our three drivers. We made up cards and bought chocolates for each. The AP will give them out tomorrow.

Tomorrow (Friday) we will lug about 30 pounds of candy and about 60 pounds of personal items to the hospital for our visit with the elderly. We will be met by some of the youth from the Moscow Mission, visit for about an hour, pass out our presents, sings some carols and then head to the Moscow Choir (made up of church members) for a concert which begins at 6:30 p.m. Then, I think the seniors will head out for a late dinner.

We have no plans for Saturday at this point. It might be nice just to sleep in!! Monday is our last day in the office and then we are off for Tallinn to renew our visas. Our visas won't be ready until Saturday now (we were supposed to get them on Thursday), and we are struggling to put our travel together to get home. Hopefully, by tomorrow we will know for sure. We would like to be back in Moscow for the New Year celebration.