Hey first off, nobody commented on my prince joke..... I'm a little put off by that actually. Oh well, I'll try to think of a better one next time. This week was really awesome because we got to go back to Novo for zone conference and we were able to see half the mission. I got to see, and even work a day in, my home city with the zone leaders. It was awesome because I was with Elder Davis, from the MTC, and he's one of my favorite missionaries in the world. The trip went well. Funny Story - there is a stop halfway between here and Novo where all the buses stop and there is a bathroom there that you have to pay 10 rubles to use. So, obviously, all sensible men just go around behind the bathroom to pee. It was just really funny and gross to go back there and see just yellow ice EVERYWHERE. haha
Well, the big news is that in July Kazakstan is being added to our mission. That will be cool, and I hope I get to go there.
Last P-day we went to a really cool place in Tomsk, it's like in the center of the city. It's a really old guard tower fort thing that looks over the whole city and it was really cool.
We did some service in a hospital here the other day. We moved all of the furniture off of one of the floors so they could do remodeling. It was really fun to get to do some manual labor like that.
V is doing really well, we taught him this week about the priesthood and he's going to be an awesome priesthood holder in a couple weeks. He really gets it.
Our other two main investigators really hit a wall. One is just too scared of responsibility and is too afraid of finding out more. He was saying how he wasn't sure if the Book of Mormon was true so we got him to pray right there with us and he is just so scared to get a direct answer he said, "God, please answer the question I have in my head right now." It's so frustrating. The other has some concern that we haven't been able to pull out yet, so we'll see. We have a second meeting tonight with our most promising of the new investigators from last week. We're pulling out the big guns, we will have the branch president there with us so I hope it will go just as well as the first lesson.
I actually bought a new jacket a few minutes ago. It's a good time because all of the stores are having sales because winter is coming closer to the end. I really like it, I hope it works out, and you should see plenty of pictures of it soon.
We've been doing some tracting in the biggest, nicest apartment buildings in the city. One, because there are a good concentration of families there. Two, because once you get in to a big building you can stay in there for a long time going through all the floors and it's nice and warm. But we had little success with it this week and the JW's had been by one of the buildings I think, because a lot of people thought we were JW's.
I guess I don't really have too much else. I'm studying the language as hard as I possibly can. Every spare moment of the day. It's a good thing I enjoy it, because I do it a lot and it's paying off, I think.
Oh yeah, they came out with a new translation of the standard works in Russian. And it's crazy because they didn't just fix a couple mistakes, they totally retranslated everything. We haven't gotten the books yet, but it's available online.
Here are just a couple pictures from up at that fort tower place.
Elder Topham
