FEEDING THE MISSIONARIES

Once transfers are announced we try to do a farewell dinner and fix the departing missionary's favorite meal. A few weeks ago we asked all four missionaries what they'd like us to fix for them, just so we could plan ahead. We're still a few weeks away from the next transfer but we know our district leader, Elder Прокопцев, is leaving because he's going home in a week and a half.  He remembered we had fixed crepes once while he was serving in Barnaul with us and asked for crepes for his farewell meal, so that's what we served on Friday after our district meeting. It's a slow process because we can only fix one at a time and our crepe pan is small, so the missionaries eat several of them. They LOVED them. But then, what's not to love about crepes?

Dave spent several hours in preparation and at the stove.

We couldn't offer all the options we usually have at home, but we did as much as we could and improvised. They could choose from ham/shredded chicken, cheese (we're not sure what kind it was), BBQ sauce/mustard/mayo, pickles/tomatoes/corn/mushrooms/cucumbers/onion, and then dessert crepe options were raspberry jam/bananas/strawberries/crushed pineapple, with butter/cinnamon sugar/Nutella/peanut butter/brown sugar/ sgrushyonka (like sweetened condensed milk). One missionary said "yes" meaning he wanted everything! Dave obliged.

 A bag of sgrushyonka

 Elder Turley (Tremonton, Utah), looking over the options and trying to decide what he wanted

 Elder Прокопцев or Prokoptsev (Latvia) hamming it up for the camera

Elder "give-me-one-with-everything" Варанков or Varankov (Moscow)

Elder Fitzgerald (American Fork, Utah)

They all LOVED the crepes and patiently waited their turns, even though it took a couple of hours.

The other requests are for stroganoff, borsch, and chicken alfredo. Hope we can find what we need. If not, that's ok--the Elders eat everything we fix for them!

This week's Russianism:
Some day we may get used to seeing a car pull up to the curb, the driver jumping out and the car pulling away. If all cars were right-hand drive, we would have figured it out a long time ago. It appears that the cars are about 50% right- and 50% left-hand drive. And yes, that does make it harder to drive and we suspect it's the cause of many accidents. We're glad we don't have a car here. From what we've seen, it appears all the driving school cars are left-hand drive.