Whooters

Zdrastvuitye!

Happy New Year!!! I hope you all had a great New Year's Celebration and that you're ready to make this the best year of your lives! In good old Penza, we've started off the New Year by freezing to death. Not even joking. On Monday through Wednesday, it was about -10 degrees Celsius (about 14 degrees Fahrenheit), and Thursday through Sunday it fluctuated between -14 and -21 degrees Celsius (about 7 to -6 degrees Fahrenheit). Today it is a nice and toasty -16 degrees Celsius outside (about 3 degrees F). The good news is, I never have to worry about my nose dripping from being so cold because literally everything in my face is frozen solid. Yay! We have to chew gum while we're on the streets because our jaws get too stiff to talk if we don't keep them moving. Living the dream!
So, I've talked about English Club a handful of times in my previous letters, but nothing has happened in a while that was worth mentioning. This week was the exception. Usually, only about 3 old fogies that can't speak English at all show up to English Club on a weekly basis. It's always fun, but not exactly the desired turnout. This week as we were about to begin the class, this guy walks into the room (total bro) with his Beats, fancy SmartPhone, and some Air Jordan Kicks, and says in perfect English, "Hey guys, sorry I'm late. I didn't mean to keep you all waiting." Umm... what? That's a rare site. His name is Islam, he was born in Saudi Arabia, grew up in Egypt, and he knows English, Arabic, and a little bit of Russian (emphasis on the 'little bit'). Also, turns out, he is the karate champion of Saudi Arabia. No big. He told us a story about how he was humiliated in front of a crowd of 20,000 people at one of his matches, and then he competed with that same component that beat him about a year later and he made him cry. Literally, who is this guy? Anyways, at the end of English Club we decided to play charades. The word that I was given was 'turtle'. I just want all of you to ponder for a minute how you would approach that situation had you been given that word. Pretty hard, huh? Yeah... I resorted to putting a trash can on my back and crawling around the floor really slow-like. Obviously nobody could figure out what I was, so I pretended to eat a little towel that fell off of the chalkboard as if it were a piece of lettuce. Good. Thankfully one of the Zone Leaders was in town for exchanges, so he got lots of pictures on his phone. Great. My pride is about the size of a baby fruit fly at this point in my mission.
Sister Warnick and I had an interesting encounter with a lady on the streets the other day while we were contacting. We were casually making our way down the sidewalk on the way to a less active's house when I handed this lady a brochure about the Plan of Salvation. I was a little hesitant to give it to her at first because (I won't lie) she looked pretty angry. I decided to cast away my doubts and fears, and lo and behold, she took it. Not only did she take it, but she opened her eyes and her mouth as big as they could possible go as she gazed at the brochure and she thanked me a million times. It doesn't end there. She started moving closer to me so I thought she was going to come in for a hug. That happens sometimes, so I just let it be. At the last second she grabbed me by the back of my head and kissed me right between the jawline and my neck..... way too sensual for a casual street contacting sesh. At that point the smell of alcohol permeated my nostrils and we moved on real swift-like.
We had another unintentionally awkward encounter with a less active. It wasn't quite as dramatic as the one mentioned above, but some startling definitely occurred. For the past 2 months, Sister Warnick and I have been searching for the home of a less active who just barely moved. After trekking around in the middle of nowhere this week, we FINALLY found her house! She lives in a new building, so it wasn't written on any maps. We were both just relieved that we found the building. When we finally got inside, Sister Warnick and I hiked up and down a bunch of stairs before we realized that the apartment we were looking for was on the first floor. Thankfully the hallway that we were looking for was pitch black, so I had to turn on the flashlight on our phone. I shined the light on every door looking for an apartment number, and right as I shined the light on this less active's door, she opened it up and the light shined right in her face! She was taken a little bit off guard and she asked us why we didn't just ring the doorbell. She probably thought we were trying to peer into her peephole with our flashlight or something. Yikes. We ended up having a great lesson with her, so that was awesome.

Sister Warnick and I literally had the most fun New Years Celebration ever! It is too dangerous for us to be on the streets on New Years Eve because we are Americans and there are a lot of drunks outside, so we had to be inside by 5 instead of 9 (last year we had to be inside by 6, but the Area Presidency decided that we needed to be inside a little earlier this year). Sister Warnick and I have been planning out our celebration for about the past month, so we were super pumped! First of all, we named the event "Who Spice" because we thought it would be funny to do our hair like Whos from the Grinch, so that kind of set the theme for the rest of the evening. So anyways, Who Spice commenced with us doing our hair all crazy. I had to use a teacup and many hair elastics and bobby pins to get my mane of hair to do what it did, but I think it turned out super funny. Sister Warnick used a tall plastic cup to accomplish her hair look. When we were finished with our hair creations, we both just looked in the mirror and laughed for a solid 5 minutes. Lots of pictures were taken, as you do.

Supposedly there's a tradition in Russia where you're supposed to write down your desire for the following year on a piece of paper, burn it, and drink the ashes in champagne. I've asked a few Russians about this "tradition" and some of them sort of know what I'm talking about and others just think I'm crazy. Not sure if it's legit or not. I did it last year with my trainer Sister Johnson, so we did it again this year. Obviously we didn't drink champagne but we bought nonalcoholic children's champagne which was actually super disgusting. The bottle said "cream soda" on it, so I thought it would be good. Nope. Nonetheless my desire was consumed. Not all of the paper burned, so I kind of had to choke down some of it, but it's fine. All is well! After that, Sister Warnick and I ate some shrimp (bringing back some traditions from home!) and watched Joseph Smith: Prophet of the Restoration to end the night. It was one of the most peculiar but most entertaining New Year's celebrations I've ever experienced in my life. I had a blast and I'm super excited to see what surprises this New Year brings:)
Welp, that's all for this week folks! Don't tote around trash cans on your backs and don't let drunk people of your same gender take things too quickly on the first encounter.

Do Svidanya!
Love,

Sister Megan Wagstaff