It is Christmas time in Bucuresti; they do it right.  There doesn't seem to be as much commercialism here as we have in the US.  They really decorate the main streets; I've placed a few pics below. They have a few great Christmas fairs (see the pics).  We've been to a few malls; they may not rival the "Mall of America" but many of them put our malls to shame.  I already posted pics of the cars the kids drive in the malls (they don't go very far but they are cool).  Toy stores have people assigned to play with the kids; Lego tables are particularly popular.  One mall had a small roller coaster, ice rink, bumper cars and boats and much more.

We are trying to concentrate on making this a good Christmas for the young missionaries.  Sora Nelson (Krisy) made a full blown Christmas dinner (she and I enjoyed it Christmas Eve) for missionaries who will come to our apartment Christmas day to Skype their parents.  She feels that the dinner is for her pretend children (missionaries) provided in her pretend home (apartment) and kitchen during this "pretend" Christmas (it was over 60 degrees F yesterday); the cooking keeps her from thinking about the real Christmas she'd like to have with her real children in her real home (Manson).  I'm working on breakfast sausage but that will have to wait a bit this year (Romanians are big on sausage; I just haven't had the guts to buy any, yet).

In addition to our normal routine and preparations for the dinner we enjoyed listening to the Christmas service in the Orthodox Church just outside our window.  It sounded like they had a boys' choir.  We also prepared our Sunday School lesson, studied Romanian and then spent quite a bit of time laying out possible scenarios for our daughters' "sister trip" to Europe this coming summer.

We've had a "teaching" dry spell recently; we've been down to one night a week for the past few weeks.  I think some of it is because of the Christmas holidays. The country basically shuts down from between 9 and 19 days depending on the employer.  We have been working hard to prepare for our office move that will occur in a few weeks.  We are moving to a much nicer building that will represent the Church well; our current offices are in a business area with some block apartment buildings (hard to tract); the new offices are in a neighborhood with some very nice houses.  The Church is, of course, footing most of the bill for the move.  Our Mission President will probably foot the rest of it himself.

Our Mission President is incredible; I've not seen many people who can keep up the schedule he maintains.  He is trying to have zone conferences (we have 5 zones in our mission) once a month. One zone is in Bucharest so that isn't too draining but the other 4 are either 4-hour drives or plane flights away.  The Bucharest zone conference involves us; we go, listen, provide support, make lunch happen and usually share our testimony.  The young missionaries are great.

We went to the annual "Doctor's Christmas Concert.  A doctor many years ago noted he had several compatriots in the hospital that were very good with musical instruments so he started this annual free musical concert.  The musicians aren't all doctors; they are professionals.  It was in the coolest theater (see below).  The music was fabulous (very professional, at least to these amateurish ears). They played a lot of classical music and Krisy and I were amazed at how many of them we recognized until we remembered why we recognized them.  Some of them were in the ballroom scene of "The Great Race" and we had heard many of the rest in cartoons.  So much for our culture.  One of our missionaries sang a solo.  Needless to say it was a highlight of the season next to having 15 or so missionaries spend some of the day with us.







Here are some more pics:

carolling missionaries

a beautiful missionary in front of an orthodox church near piati universitate

The Christmas pig at the market; no I'm not talking about me

The Hobbit Dragon coming through to a mall in Bucuresti

The sock maker at a fair

You name it and they'll pickle it

A small part of the fun at one mall.