Samara Teacher Training and OUR FIRST PACKAGE!!!

The third voyage of the VW Kosmynin - StarDate 23-11-2012.  The road from Saratov to Samara has not improved in the two months since we last drove it.  We listened to language lessons on the iPod most of the way.  When we got to the mission home - the "second apartment" - which is where extra people stay when they are in town - we were excited to find out that the mission office and President and Sister Sartori were feeding their missionaries - "another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn''t be beat" (Arlo Guthrie, 1967).  We got there just as they were being served.  In the interests of being polite we had our second Thanksgiving dinner.  This Friday we feed our zone and will enjoy our third Thanksgiving dinner.  We do what we have to do.

The dinner was great but the real reason we came to Samara was for our Saturday mission-wide teacher training.  As you can see from the pictures we had a great group of seminary and institute teachers.  I was so impressed with the quality of the instruction.  Our fearless CES leader assigned four different teachers to present various teaching instruction and they did a fantastic job.  Great spirit in the room and we thoroughly enjoyed the training.  We bought pizza for the group - when I say "we" I mean we paid for it and then will get reimbursed by CES - for lunch.  We did not order the pizza, however.  I hate to tell my grandchildren this but one of the pizzas was tuna fish.  And one was dill pickle pizza.  And the ONLY ONE with meat on it also had dill pickles.  I gave the pickles to Sherry and she ate them and liked them.  I still love her and everything but she is kinda strange sometimes.

After the training - which lasted six hours - we took the electric tram back to the mission home with two of the teachers...two sisters form Zavodskoy.  We rode here with our boss but he took two others back with him.  These two sisters and Sherry and I got to ride the train back to Saratov.  More on that later.

We enjoyed a fun afternoon and evening eating PB&J sandwiches from OUR FIRST PACKAGE sent by my current favorite child Hannah.  Christopher actually mailed it so he is also our favorite child. We couldn't believe how excited we were to open it even though we knew most of what was in it.  We now have enough peanut butter!  The best part were the family pictures Hannah sent - very heavily weighted with pictures of Lilly, of course.  Neyt Problem!