June 7, 2008 (Saturday)

A few of the girls were woken up by Romanian men banging on our door extremely early this morning. No one answered it though…we still have no idea who it was, but we weren’t expecting anyone so I’m glad no one opened it. Hopefully it was just a neighbor? Who knows…

Last night was an interesting night. We had the other apartment over for a sleepover so we had three in our bed and the rest slept out on the couches. Lets just say I don’t think anyone had the most amazing night sleep, but we still had fun. It could have been a worse situation. Mindy was stuck between Annie and I. Poor thing – that’s the worse spot.

After we got going for the day we went over and used the internet for a few hours. I went to check my Facebook and my friends changed my birthday on my profile to today. So I had like 13 notifications saying “Happy Birthday!” Then in my status it said “Whitney is so excited to have her birthday in Romania!” They are such little stinkers. I found out that Whitney was the culprit, but she claims it was peer pressure. It’s okay though because I got Whitney back. Later in the afternoon I went online and changed her relationship status to “engaged” and on her status put “Whitney is so excited she is engaged!” I can’t wait until she finds it. Haha….

In the afternoon a couple of us girls decided to go to sports day. The sisters and elders attend along with any branch members, friends and investigators. It felt good to run around, but it was pretty hot outside. We played Ultimate Frisbee. That game isn’t exactly my favorite, and I’m not amazing at it but we still had fun. Before we started playing Frisbee us girls had fun doing girly contests. MacKenzie and I tried to see how many cartwheels in a row we could do. Not a smart idea. I’m starting to get dizzy much easier than I used to.

While we were playing Frisbee Kenz accidentally threw the Frisbee and it landed in the middle of the street. Elder Melke was more than happy to run out and get it for her. He has a crush on Kenz. When he was dodging cars to get it I started laughing and was like “he’s going to get killed trying to save the Frisbee you threw.” She just started laughing…

For one of our assignments this week we had to take a person from our apartment out on a date. The catch was that we had to pick someone that we spend the least amount of time with. Mary was my date. We had a good time. We went shopping for a wallet for me and a shirt for her. I found a cute wallet that I can carry around with me through my European adventures and she ended up getting a USB that she badly needed. We chatted about life and past relationships. It’s always fun getting to know someone you don’t know well. Then after we were done shopping we went and got ice cream from the Gelatto store. It was good, but I wish they just had regular ice cream. I miss that a lot! They don’t even sell it in the grocery stores here.

Our evening consisted of going to dinner with three boys from Moldova who were Elisa’s friends. The first restaurant we went to they didn’t have enough food or room for us because they had a large party. I’ve never had a restaurant turn me away because they didn’t have enough food. Such a Romania thing to happen. So we found another restaurant nearby called “No Stress.” Once again we discovered that when you go out to eat in Europe you plan for a couple of hours. It took them two hours to bring our food out. We had a good time anyways though. We played telephone a couple of times and told random stories. The boys got a kick out of my story about trying to return a camera. Then they told us about some stories on their mission in Russia with the mafia. They were pretty crazy. I can’t believe a mafia still exists. They told us a story about when men from the mafia confronted them who they had never met before. What was crazy was that the men knew where they lived, what their first names were - their schedules, etc. They don’t mess around. They asked them for money, and they gave them some. They didn’t have much of a choice though…they mean business. The Moldova boy said they even dressed like mafia – they had the black suits, black leather shoes…the whole shebang!

Dinner ended up being less than impressive. Kenz and I split pasta marinara and somehow the sauce had some type of seafood in it. I despise seafood! I wish we could read the menus better. By the time our food came it was freezing outside. One of the Moldova boys gave Melissa and I a jacket to share and then our waiter brought out a bunch of random jackets for the rest of the girls. We were cracking up – we had no idea where the jackets came from, but at least they kept us warm. We kept cracking jokes that they were probably the jackets of people from some other table… By the time we left the restaurant it was almost midnight. Thank goodness we had boys to walk home with us. Otherwise I wouldn’t of felt comfortable being out that late. We have been advised to be home by the time it gets dark – good advice…