A week of lasts....

This has been a busy week as we train the Woods and orient them to their new jobs and the big city around them. And a week of the "last time to.."

We started Monday morning with some office orientation, then took off in the afternoon for lunch at Oxta ("Okhta") Mall and then grocery shopping. We had to stop and take a photo of Ken's favorite kiosk that sells root beer. It turns out that Sister Wood is a big Dr. Pepper fan, and they have that there, too.

We went to a new "Siberian Burger" place in the food court on the third floor. They were pretty good! Very juicy, homemade buns that were yummy, but more expensive than McD or BK.

Then it was down to the minus-two floor to Lenta to shop. We called and told Rawsons we were there so they could come in the car and carry home the Wood's initial big grocery haul. We spent about 90 minutes walking up and down every aisle showing the Woods what to buy, how things are called in Russian, etc. We'd just about finished, with a cart full of food and just produce left to go when the announcement started coming over the loud-speaker in both Russian and English. "There are technical difficulties. Please leave the mall immediately." It was repeated over and over and over in Russian and English. We abandoned carts, went to get our big coats from the lockers and walked to the car in the basement parking garage. President Rawson drove us all up to the street. We sat there for about 20 minutes. They cleared everyone away from the mall sidewalks and out into the surface parking lot. So we finally gave up and went home, stopping at the neighborhood Cemya little store for a few items to hold over until the next try for a big trip. We looked on the news and talked to Russians about it later. Twenty-eight(!) malls and large stores all had bomb threats called in that afternoon. What a pain!! We think about all that food left out. Most could just be put back on the shelf, but not frozen items or fresh meat, we hope.

The Rawsons finally had time on Friday morning to take the Woods to Metro Cash & Carry. That's the big Costco-like store. They brought them back to the apartment to unload their groceries and then Woods came to the Hermitage with us in the afternoon. (See below.) The Rawsons and the Assistants went back to Oxta Mall to have lunch and do some other shopping there and pick up the dry cleaning. There was another bomb scare while they were in the food court!! Sister Rawson got her salad, but the others were still waiting in line at KFC.  

Speaking of KFC, we like their ads on the elevator doors in Oxta Mall, surrounded by the river of St. Petersburg.  

Ken's other fun thing this week has been to go play floorball in the mornings. Floorball is like street hockey, but played indoors with a whiffle ball and plastic sticks. There are three people on each floorball team, and usually that is the six young volunteers who live here in Center -- the Assistants, the Center Elders and the Center Sisters. But we are currently living in the Center Elders' apartment, so they recruited Ken to come and play in the mornings. Sue doesn't play because she has a strange back that can't run around until she's been up walking for a couple of hours.  

Sisters Gursch & Stockman, Elders Meek, Thieme
Allen & Wood, Sister Wood.

We wanted Woods to come and play, too, but it took them a few days to get over their jet lag enough to come. Here you can see the players and the last of the decorations from last week's dance party for couples.

Ken, Sue, Sisters Stockman and Gursch
Elders Thieme, Meek, Wood, Sister Wood

Tuesday we had District Meeting. It's our first of the Transfer, and our last! There is no District Meeting next week because of Zone Conference.

Wednesday was Ken's birthday. Here is the birthday card that Sue makes for all the volunteers. He got one, too, of course.  

The volunteers love the candy, and laugh because the words on the right side say "Happy Birthday" phonetically in Russian.

We went out to birthday dinner with the Woods for Chinese food, but Ken forgot to take a picture!! He must be getting old.

We've had some weird weather this week, with a lot of rain/sleet in the beginning of the week. But Thursday was the worst. Sue went over to the office early, and it was snowing like crazy!! It was blowing hard and you could hardly see across the street. Then about 11 a.m. Sister Wood looked out of the husband's office and said, "The sun is shining!" We were totally surprised. The rest of the afternoon was absolutely gorgeous! Blue sky, sunshine, but still cold.

This is the Church building. Ken's office is the two windows just to the right of the stairs.

We've had a lot of dinners out this week! Thursday night we and the Sisters, including Alyona, were invited to the home of Mikhail and his family for dinner. His daughter, Dasha, joined our church shortly after we arrived. She has moved to China to study, but we are still friends with her Dad. He cooked a great meal for us while we played with his little dog.

Friday afternoon we went for our last trip to the Hermitage. We have loved this place so much. We feel like we've seen a lot of it in our nearly 100 visits, but not all!  

We shared the time with the Woods, showing them how to do the helping at the gate. Then we split up. Sue took Sister Wood for a quick one-hour orientation to the basics of the layout of the museum. Then we came back to the turnstiles, and Ken took Elder Wood around for a similar tour while the women took care of the entrance.

While walking around the Hermitage, we were looking out of the windows at the Neva River. It's gotten really cold the last couple of days, so the river is frozen hard, and there were lots of people out walking in the sunshine.

After we finished our time we took them down to the Hermitage Volunteer Office to meet the people there. Mikhail was in Berlin, but Vera was there, and we were able to say Good Bye and Thanks!! She has been so wonderful to work with.  

We had all gotten up for 6:40am floorball, and finished standing and walking for three hours at the Hermitage, so then it was time to show the Woods some of downtown St. Petersburg! We started with St. Isaac's Cathedral. But we walked around the outside to take photos in the sunshine, and got to the ticket office just as they were shutting down for the evening. The Woods will have to go back another day and climb the stairs to the top to walk around the dome.

While walking back to Nevsky Prospekt (the main street), we passed by this plaque on a building. There are plaques everywhere downtown. This says that Tschkaikovsky died here!

Then we took the Woods to the Literary Cafe for dinner. It's our "most Russian" place we like to go. It was the local coffee house hang-out for the Russian literary crowd in the 1830's and since. Pushkin, the most famous Russian poet, had his last meal here before he went off to fight the duel that killed him. 

Ken is still taking photos of beautiful scenery, and here is the frozen Moika Canal from Nevsky Prospekt with the Savior on Spilled Blood memorial in the background.

Riding in the Metro (subway) there are advertisements in the middle of the escalators. Most of them are for stores or concerts or various products. But some are aimed at tourists about St. Petersburg. This is Sue's favorite. The St. Petersburg ones feature little rabbits and a question. This one says, "Who raises the bridges?" and shows the rabbits turning the wheel to raise the draw bridge. There are 20 or so bridges, and when the river is not frozen the drawbridges are only up from 2a.m. to 5a.m. each morning. Ken took some photos last summer at that hour.

We've also been working on fixing up the apartment we are in. Young Elders have lived there for the last 10+ years, and the most recent ones were not the best housekeepers, and some things just need fixing. There were three vacuums; one worked. Ken fixed one, and got our fix-everything helper in the Office, Brother Leostrin, to fix the other one. They've also both been gluing wooden chairs to be more sturdy and less wobbly. Part of this process also included a trip to Ikea on Saturday afternoon. We took the Woods along so they know how to get there, and they needed a can opener. They asked us how to make the can opener work and Sue said, "That's the world's worst can opener!!" So we both bought a new one. But the big purchase was black-out curtains for the bedroom in the Center Elders apartment. They had put up aluminum foil on the windows--ugly! The kitchen only had a curtain on half the window, and it was crumbling. Sue threw it away. The old bedroom curtains have been washed and moved to the kitchen and new curtains are up in the bedroom. Much better!! The windows are identical, so that made it easy.

After Ikea we went to the Fontanka building for our last English Night. There were a lot of people there, all divided into groups of three or four, with an English speaking discussion leader. Ken and Sue each lead a group. Every seven minutes we moved to a new group and asked them the same questions. Our topics were work and education. Other group leaders had topics like music, family, service, etc. We did this for almost two hours to get around to all the groups! It was really fun, and we met a lot of nice people. Sue's favorite was a young woman who is a Computer Science major here at a university. She is learning FORTRAN and Assembly Language!! Sue learned those about 50 years ago, but she didn't think anyone used FORTRAN anymore. The woman said they still use it for scientific and math analysis. Of course, someone has to learn Assembly Language to write the interface between the computer and all those higher level languages, but not many people bother.




After the meeting Sisters James and Karlsson managed to play a little pool.









On Sunday we were asked to speak in Church for a few minutes. The Woods spoke first and did a little Russian and then English.  We did the same. We all had Alyona to translate for us. She's great! But she and Ken were both a little teary, and then Sue came up to speak and we were all crying a bit. It's so hard to leave all these wonderful people we have grown to love. We will be here for one more Sunday, but it is Stake Conference, so all the people from all the wards in St. Petersburg will be together in one big meeting. That's not the time to say our Good Bye's to Center Ward.

Ken took a picture of all the men after the meeting. Yesterday was "Defenders of the Fatherland Day" in Russia. I guess we'd call that Veteran's Day in the USA, but since Russia has required military service for all men, they just call it Men's Day. They handed out chocolate bars to all the men with a Thank You card after church.

Then after Church the ward had a "linger longer" farewell party for us. They are all so wonderful. There are some really good cooks in this ward! They made rolled sandwiches and cakes and pirogi. And there was also warm mors (cranberry juice tea) and fruit. But mostly we felt so honored and loved. 

And they gave us a bag of wonderful souvenirs from St. Petersburg -- World Cup mementos, lovely matroishka dolls, and a book about the city with great photos.  

We are really starting to miss it here already.

For all you Mom lurkers who are much more interested in the young volunteers than in us Allens, you will be glad to know that the Woods have also started a blog. Like ours, it is not searchable and you need to know the URL. And the same rules apply about not re-posting to any other social media. You can get on their email group to get notifications by sending a request to: woods-russian-mission-email-list@googlegroups.com 

Or just look for their blog here. They are just figuring out how to do this, so will go through the same learning curve that we did. We all started out with funny fonts and pictures in the wrong place. They'll figure it out.