Hey guys so it's been a pretty sweet week and first off I wanna give a shout out to literally everyone BECAUSE I LOVE YOU SO MUCH AND IM SO GRATEFUL FOR YOUR INFLUENCE IN MY LIFE. So yeah happy thanksgiving everybody.

So the Godfrey's threw this big ol' thanksgiving feast for all of the Missionaries on Thursday. Okay and first off, I was assigned to make a salad and I was thinking "ayo this is finally my chance to show everyone that I'm not a terrible cook" so I pull out the Missionary cookbook and flip to the most gnarly looking salad to make and I'm like yeah this will be lit. Okay so yeah it took me 3 HOURS TO MAKE THIS DANG SALAD. It wasn't even that hard of a salad I'm just terrible. I put my blood, sweat, and a whole lot of tears into this salad with beans, rice, avacados, tomatoes,onions, and this lime chili dressing. It ended up being mediocre. Most would rate 6/10. Not bad for me though. Worth it? Probably not. Would I do it again? Probably not. How much extra salad did we have after Thanksgiving? Too much. So now I have a decent pot of salad just chilling at home. But yeah to make it even better Elder Dumbrell was in charge of dessert and he literally just put butter and sprinkles on bread and everyone loved it. It's some autralian thing called "fairy bread." I guess the moral of the story is always go cheap and don't put any effort into anything. (jokes jokes). 

But yeah back to Thanksgiving, the Godfrey's set up this whole thing and we had lots of food(fairy bread). It actually really reminded me of home which was bittersweet. They did this thing where you try to guess how many m&m's are in a jar and elder dumbrell won that lol. And then we played Uno with the sisters and guess who won? Yes ya boi старейшина уайтинг. That's me btw. 

So we didn't have too many big things happen this week other than thanksgiving. We haven't been having too much success recently but our investigator Arif is still a superstar. He's taking everything super well. So I thought I would take the time to write some interesting things that happened this week:

-I BEAT ELDER DUMBRELL IN PING PONG only one time out of five games..... turns out I lost all of my ping pong skillz

-So I found out that animals in Russian make different noises than in English. Like the dog goes "bark" and the pig says "oink" and stuff like that. So check this out:

Dog- Bark (eng) = Guff (rus)

Horse- Neigh (eng) = Ee-go-go-go (rus) - (my favorite)

Pig- Oink (eng) = Hru (rus) -(you gotta make the H sound in your throat & roll the R)

-There's this Russian superstition that if you whistle indoors then it means you will have no money. I've been called out a few times by old people here that tell me not to whistle indoors. At this point I'm pretty sure the Whiting family is about 100 years cursed with no money. 

-There's another Russian superstition that if you open a window on one side of the room and then you open another on the other side then it will create a current and you'll get sick so if there's two windows open in a room they'll freak out and tell you that you'll get sick. It's pretty funny actually.

-We had a member come to our district meeting on Friday and he used to be a cop and one of his jobs had to do with talking to people so long story short this guy is a talker. We invited him to district meeting to tell us about the people of Moldova and that their first thoughts are when they see us and so we gave him 15 minutes to speak and he ended up talking for the entire hour and a half it was so funny. He basically bashed jehovahs witnesses the whole time hahah. Not really it was actually super helpful but he's a funny guy. 

-We went block-knocking for the first time in a while this week and I was quite excited because block knocking is the worst haha. Anyway the highlight was when we were teaching this old lady about the book of mormon and I was talking about how it starts in Jerusalem and then she says "I was in Jerusalem once" and like it was kinda weird bc I was in the middle of explaning but not really that weird but then I continue to explain and then she would just bring up the most random things that had nothing to do what we were talking about. She would throw in stuff like "the 7 day adventists through a lovely funeral this week," and "you have beautiful eyes" and "are your parents alive?" and yeah we gave a book of mormon away but not too sure if she really got the message hahah. 

And so this is officially my last week of training and on Saturday we'll find out where we will be and who we will be serving with. I'm super stoked. Because of the way transfers happened we got an extra week of training so I got 13 weeks with my comp instead of 12. It's been really awesome though and I've really enjoyed my time here so far. There's only 2 cities we can serve in here as a Russian speaker, Chisinau and Balti. There's 6 in Chisinau and 4 in Balti and so just a little background info. 

Because it was Thanksgiving I just want to talk a little bit about how being thankful goes a long way and that we really should thank the Lord in ALL things. We are so blessed and we don't even realize it sometimes. God has given us this beautiful earth and so many opportunities to do good and to be blessings for other. My challenge this week for you all is to go out and so some service for somebody this week no matter how big or small it is and just help somebody. I promise you that you will find more happiness and peace in the weeks to come.

This week I'm doing a language fast so I'm going to try to speak only Russian all week haha wish me luck. Love you all!

-Старейшина Уайтинг

(if you didn't get the subject it means "bon appetite") 

Videos:

-Walking home from the church

-Our apartment

Picss:

- Elder Dumbrell

-Elder Solov'iov and Elder Walch (elder walch is in the middle of saying "i got 2 phones")

-Okay so I'm a terrible cook but if there's one thing I am good at making (my fam can attest to this) it's fries. So I made some bomb fries one morning and it was tight.

-Our lil neighborhood grocery store Linella

-an egg I cooked that faintly looks like australia hahahaha

-Our church building

-This cool hawaiian pizza we had this week. It had pineapple, bananas, poppyseed, cherries, chocolate sauce, with cheese. Super weird but pretty good.

-Chișinău