January Blahs Brightened

Being from the Northwest, we thought we knew grey! Now that we are seasoned Bucharestites, we are sure there can be nothing grey-er than Bucharest in winter. The sooty block buildings, the greasy streets, the grimy cars, the mucky sidewalks, not to mention the cloudy sky, all combine together to produce a colorless view out our window. There's a newborn baby in the apartment just below ours and when we hear the wailing cry, we are reminded that life is good and there's no time for melancholy. Our work continues and in the past week we met with two NGO's to officially sign donation agreements that will bring another 650 wheelchairs into Romania this spring. We also did something we have wanted to do our entire mission...attend a concert in the beautiful Athenium. We gathered all the senior couples together and had a wonderful time forgetting all there is to do!

This lady didn't get the memo about spring being right around the corner! Romanians have a hard time smiling, even when you ask them to! Sometimes when I see these faces, I hum to myself the song, "Smile through your heart is breaking, smile even though you're aching, while there are clouds in the sky, you'll get by...." It makes me smile, anyway!

This is the Athenium. It was built in 1888 and it is a European masterpiece.

We snapped this picture right inside the gorgeous lobby.

L to R: President and Sora Lundberg (SLC), Elder and Sora Linerud (Spokane), Elder and Sora Van Orman (Provo), Elder and Sora Dummar (Heber).

The Athenium underwent a total restoration immediately after the revolution.

A fun time was had by all.

The program was performed by the philharmonic orchestra and included the works of

Williams, Bernstein and Gershwin.

Later in the week we traveled to a wheelchair partner, Motivation Romania to inspect the shipment of 370 wheelchairs that had just arrived.

Each wheelchair has some assembly involved and we watched while these employees masterfully worked to assemble them.

15 down, 355 to go!

And now for the highlight of the week! If you ask a missionary a fast food they miss most from home, the first answer is always, "Subway"! We have McDonalds, KFC, and BurgerKing but we don't have a Subway!

For our District meeting lunch, we made hats (I downloaded the logo and just printed it!) and reconstructed a Subway shop right in our kitchen! As you can see, we covered every detail, right down to the gloves, wrapping in paper and stuffing the footlong into a plastic bag. The missionaries loved our idea and we had a blast pulling it off! We are going to have to work on a soda pop dispenser with free refills but we have to leave some ideas for the new couple replacing us in 57 days (but who's counting?)!