Ladies Christmas Party

Oops, This is out of order. Monday, December 1st was Romania Day. Since

everyone was off school and work we took the opportunity to have a ladies

Christmas party. This was kind of a last minute plan and was not very well

organized, but never-the-less we had a great time. We revisited our

childhoods a little and cut out snowflakes. We also did other crafts, played

games, ate (of course), sang, and had a white elephant gift exchange. It was

a good time to spend time with our sisters, and get to know one another a

little better.

Lock- in @ Pitesti

Friday, December 5th, six of us took the bus to Pitesti for a lock-in. We were joined also by a group from Bucharest. We had a great time with devotionals, food, and games. We also took a walk at 3 AM in Pitesti's beautiful square. I wish I had some more pictures but the four batteries we bought lasted only long enough to get about 6 pictures. I will have to get some pictures from some others and hope for a better camera for Christmas. Anyway, all who attended were so encouraged that it was decided to have a lock-in here in the spring. The congregation is eager

to start planning for it.

It's begining to look a lot like Christmas!

Everywhere we look it is begining to look like Christmas. There is a huge Christmas tree in the main square with an ice skating rink and shopping. Over the weekend we attended a Christmas concert in the square and were introduced to Romanian Christmas carols.

Thanksgiving

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! We were supposed to give a presentation to some military English students about the holiday, but we later found out that we would need military clearance. So we spent a quiet Thanksgiving with the girls doing a play for us and enough food to feed an army. I guess I am too used to fixing Thanksgiving for a large crowd. Even though I scaled back the recipes and didn't fix as many types of dishes we still had tons of food. We had saved pecans that we brought with us to make a delicious pecan pie. It did not last long.

First Snow

November 22 we had our first snow. Hannah and Elizabeth had a great time playing and building a snowman, while the rest of us stayed where it was warmer.

Romania National Conference

In October we took a train to Bucharest for the National Conference. The trip there was filled with breathtaking fall scenery. We arrived a day early to take the opportunity to shop for some much needed winter clothing items that had been too heavy to fit in our luggage when we moved. The metro proved to be a time saving means of travel compared to the traffic clogged roadways. We were all pleased with being able to understand a few more words in Romanian and glad that we had previously gotten acquainted with the metro in DC. We were also pleased to see improved security. The conference was a great opportunity to visit with friends we had made at camp and to meet other christians from around Romania. We had some great lessons by some very talented Romanian bretheren, some awesome meals, and some wonderful fellowship. We even managed to squeeze in a few minutes(literally) of site seeing. On the trip home we learned to be careful of vendors on the train, when I inadvertantly bought an Oct1984 edition of National Geographic. Oh well, live and learn! At least it was in English and I had something to read since it was too dark for scenery. Next time I will plan ahead.

Church Camp

The last week of August we took the train to Cluj for church camp. We arrived in time to walk with some of the group from the previous camp session to Cluj's Botanical Gardens. It was just a short walk from the church building. The gardens were beautiful and very peaceful. We also went to the mall to check out the Pizza Hut and KFC. (It is amazing how you can miss things that you don't even particularly like when you can't have them.) The camp was up in the mountains a few miles outside of town , and the preacher from Oradea drove us out to it that evening. The cabin was very nice, with a brook that ran along behind it. If we opened the window at night you could hear it bubbling. We had a ton of fun, and it was a great opportunity to get to make new friends from all the other congregations in Romania. It will be better when we learn more Romanian and don't have to rely on people to translate for us. I'm not sure what happened to our pictures from this week, but I have some one of the men from camp took and put on a disc for us.