Dear Family,
There's not a whole lot to talk about from this last week. We had quite a few P-days in a row, as I explained last week, and so we had lots of time. It was very strange actually, not doing anything. Even though that's what I mainly did before the mission. It felt really weird going back to that kind of feel for a bit. One day, we were playing a card game called "Bang!" (kind of like "Cowboys and Indians" in card form - really pretty fun) and we'd play one round, look at the clock, play another round, look at the clock again, be surprised that basically no time had passed, play another round, etc... One day we were looking at the clock almost every fifteen to thirty minutes for a few hours.
On Thursday, however, we went to the Christmas conference that I mentioned last week, and it was really good. In the morning half, all the districts got to do a performance of whatever they wanted. We had everything from singing spiritual songs to Czech Prague mission's 12 days of Christmas and a video of missionary work in Košice (it was really funny - and was meant to be). Then we split the entire conference into three groups and went to different parts of Prague and did singing street displays. Ours was really good. We were on Můstek. People by the dozens were stopping, taking pictures, listening, and most importantly, getting contacted by missionaries. I think that it was really successful. I sang for about thirty minutes and then went out contacting and actually spoke to some really cool people. Singing really brought the Spirit. Sadly, one of the groups had a protest come by while they were singing. They were protesting the cruel killing and eating of carp for Christmas (that's a Czech tradition). They protested by taking normal Christmas carols and changing the words toward their cause. The missionaries from that group said that it kind of destroyed it. That's too bad. At least ours was good. :D
Other than that, we did a lot of sitting around, watched a Czech fairytale or two, visited members (mostly all were earlier on in the week because they already had plans for Christmas with their families) and stared at each other. We basically spent the entire four days we had free together with the other missionaries. We had a pretty good time, despite our boredom. :-)
On Christmas we opened our presents, and I have a picture of my present opened! It's a tradition in our family to take a picture of the person sitting on the couch with all their gifts around them, so I thought, why not this year too? I love my present.
Hope you all had a 'wonderfultastic' Christmas! Have an even more wonderful new year.
Starší Monk