Shurtz Start Two Finnish: Dinners and Dresses

Beautiful leaf from Monday our morning walk

Beautiful old car from our Tuesday morning walk

Beautiful sunrise on Wednesday morning walk.

This kind couple brought these bags to the mission office for one of the missionaries.

The sister had served as a missionary here in the 1980's.

I think that they used up 1/2 of one suitcase to bring these things.

They also took an uber to get to the office.

It was so kind of them to bring these things from the missionary's family.

We noticed that they had changed the flowers in the lobby, and there was a bowl of apples.

On our walk Thursday morning, it was rather cloudy but wasn't raining.

We noticed a pink cloud in a mostly eastern direction.

We turned around and looked to the East and saw more pink in the sky.

Another beautiful sunrise.

On Thursday, Sister Leavitt was able to finally close an apartment in the housing program. She has been working on reducing the number of "unsafe" houses in the mission. Some of those are actually apartments that we no longer have, but we have not been able to close in the housing program until we got the deposit back from the landlord. As long as they are "open" they show up as "unsafe". So now that this house could be closed, it also got rid of one of the "unsafe houses". Yay!

And Sister Anttila was able to find out from Posti about how to stop paying posti for pickup service since we are not using that service. She needed to fill out an online form that was a general form and not specific for what we needed, but it was exciting when she got the form submitted.

Thursday evening we had Anna over for dinner. She has been a member just over a year. She is preparing to go to the temple this next week. She is also preparing to leave on a mission in about a month. We would like to be able to help support her on her mission.

She is such a sweet person and we have come to dearly love her.

Last week we received a notice (in Finnish) in our apartment that was basically saying that they were going to be working on the "cooling system" in our building and would be entering our apartments 2 or 3 times on Thursday, Friday and Monday and they would use the master key if no one was home.

We came home Thursday to find that the fan was blowing and it felt quite cool in the apartment

and we also saw this note on the "thermostat" device on the wall.

Google translate did not do such a great job with translating this. We were grateful that Anna was coming so she could tell us for sure just what this note was saying.

It said to not touch, but just leave in as set until Monday.

Look at the temperature that it is set at!

Good thing it is only a "cooling system" and not an "air conditioner".

We were also grateful to come home of Friday and find that the note had been removed.

These trees are some that we pass on the way to the mission office.

Last Friday, Sister Aura brought me flowers when she came to the office to pick up some things.

They were still looking pretty good a week later, especially one rose.

Elder Shurtz worked with Elder Smith to get him certified to drive the mission van.

Elder Smith is the first missionary who has actually found out how and actually gotten the spare tire down. He is cranking it back up in this photo.

Friday evening we got together with the other senior missionaries.

We had dinner at the Glo Hotel, but forgot to get a picture.

After dinner, we went to the Woodland's apartment for chocolate and caramel fondue.

It was nice to get together. The Tophams even came down from Tampere.

On Saturday, we went to visit Sister Anttila. She had invited us to come to her home.

She said we would have a bit of food. We had a lot of very delicious food!

We started off with some mushroom soup and some bread.

Then we has salad, mashed potatoes and karelian stew.

For dessert we had mud cake and icecream.

It was delicious and her table was beautifully set, but we forgot to get a picture.

We got this picture before we left.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the candy advent calendars had begun to appear in the stores.

I am very surprised how much Christmas stuff (particularly candy) is appearing on the shelves.

I guess particularly as it is getting darker and the weather is turning more gray and rainy,

it is nice to see some Christmas things to have something to look forward to.

Today, I wore one of my new Marimekko dresses to church.

I know that Sister Leavitt has this same dress, but she was attending the Espoo ward.

At the end of Sacrament meeting I saw that Sister Walker was wearing my same dress.

We were invited to go to the Grant's home for dinner. She has been trying for a while now to find a time to get us to come for dinner, and was thinking about this next week, but we are busy, so she suggested today. We enjoyed salmon soup and bread, with blueberry pie and icecream for dessert.