Barrett's email, January 7th

 

Christmas dinner table

Skype

This one's for Spencer

There's no way the eerie beauty of this forest could be captured in a picture, but it was cool

 Street in Podolsk

Happy Birthday to Dad and Ana!

PODOLSK!

The city of Factories (that's a factory behind that wall)

 Mission Christmas party, former companion playing the violin. Who knew

Elder Potter (from England, no joke) reading some of Dickens' Christmas Carol "the right way as only a true englishman could"

 Usually I delete names but there is no way this is funny unless you know the name :)

Quartet, and no, the one on the left is not standing on a couple boxes, he is really that tall

I risked looking like a creeper to get this picture of some random kid. I thought Mike might like to see it. And don't worry, I didn't look like a creeper

Holy cow! Be sure to tell Bishop A thank you from me. And tell him I love him. wow.

Well, it's been quite a week. Last time we spoke it was New years eve. Well, that night we got to watch a couple movies. We watched all three Toy Stories....I cry at the end of the third one everytime. And we watched the Lion King. From midnight to about 3 in the morning there were fireworks going off right outside our window. And I mean RIGHT outside our window. And not little bottle rockets. We're talking fourth of July fireworks close enough to almost hit our building. It was crazy. I love Russia

And on friday we had our mission christmas party. The mission has changed a lot since last year. Last year each disrict did a skit, but now there's too many people, so every zone did a big skit. Our zone did the 12 days of christmas missionary style. We got the 11th day and threw 11 kontiki (those awesome ukranian cookies) out into the audience. I also was asked to help another distcrict with their skit. They did contacting situations but set them up like Pokemon battles, so they got the sheet music for the pokemon videogame fight song and asked me to play it. It was funny.

Okay gotta go. Thank you mom for everything. Tell everyone hi and I love them. Congratulate the new bishopric for me.

Have a great day. Love you

Elder Hamp