Our "one" room. The new bed is the blue one. Phil sleeps kitty corner on the yellow bed. I am standing in the far corner of the room to take this picture. You can barely see the corner of the TV on the bottom right side.
July 20, 2011
Well, our new Mission President and his wife, N. Warren & Marilyn Clark, arrived on Tuesday, July 12th. They met with our outgoing temporary president, Elder Neuenschwander, at the airport for an hour or so and then came over to the mission office to briefly meet people. They then went to the mission home and crashed. They weren’t interested in dinner, just sleep. In spite of what I know to be incredible jet lag, they showed up the next day at the office. Sister Hazlewood and I provided dinner for them that night (soup, salad and bread). They were swamped with people wanting to meet them, but they were gracious and friendly and managed to stay on their feet while looking cool and collected. Impressive.
Like Elder Neuenschwander, President Clark jumped right in interviewing missionaries and members and meeting with the office staff. On Wednesday I went in the mission van with Sister Clark and Igor, the mission driver, to the grocery store to help her get a few things. I was more than glad to do it. First, I remember being in such a daze my first few days in Russia (last time) that I could hardly think straight let alone figure out the Russian food labels, so I knew she needed help. Second, I picked up some food for us while I was there, which saved Phil and I a long walk pulling “bobcarts” in the heat.
Phil and Igor the driver did find some time to go down to Ikea and buy me a new bed. We had already gone down ourselves and picked out what we wanted, but had no way to get it home (we figured delivery might be a little dicey and unpredictable, and they only bring it to the curb, not into the building). We really didn’t have space enough to buy a big bed for both of us, so we decided to buy a twin bed for me which we would place right next to the couch/bed where Phil will sleep from corner to corner. That seems to work just fine. My bed is about 6” higher than the couch/bed, but when we want to lounge around and read or watch TV (in Russian for language study or sometimes National Geographic when we are desperate to watch something in English), we lie around on his bed and prop our heads up against my bed. It really is quite comfortable. As it is, our room is almost filled up with beds. We don’t exactly have any company, so we never bother to turn the bed back into a couch. This is not that big of a place, but it is also not much to clean. This kitchen and bathroom are actually much nicer than our former, bigger apartment. And it’s so much quieter and pleasant and only 30 steps to the office, which will be great in the winter. It all works out.
This last week we have been staying at the office until about 7pm every night, skipping lunch. We have been incredibly busy trying to get the President up to speed on everything. The poor man hasn’t had a personal phone and couldn’t figure out how to work the mission home landline phone. He didn’t have the passwords and access codes to get onto the computer at the mission home, and he lacked some of the mission president codes at the office. Trying to get that all figured out has been wild. The Church has its East European Headquarters in Moscow, so they finally diverted an I-phone, slated for someone else, up to him, but it was missing a vital piece so it wouldn’t work. Phil and I spent four hours walking all over St. Petersburg, going to several different phone and Apple stores, trying to find out how to get that piece, without any luck. Phil took Gennady, a Russian office staff member, with him this afternoon and they still couldn’t find the piece, but they did find out where to get an after-market piece. (Gennady, with some prodding, picked it up the next day. Gennady was sure the piece was probably manufactured by a “drunken Chinese” and wouldn’t work, but it did, so now the President finally has a phone.) The President and his wife have spent the last two days at a town called Pskov, about 6 hours south of here. They spent last weekend 8 hours north at another town in our mission. They have been truly running around at top speed.
The Clarks only had about two weeks’ notice that they were coming to Russia, so they really didn’t have time to get prepared. All missionaries wear nametags, including the president and his wife, but Elder Gerard noticed that their nametags were weird and the name of Christ was misspelled on the tag. So I had to figure out how to put a patch over that mistake—that would have been very offensive to Russians—and then email and call back and forth with the Mission Training Center (MTC)bookstore in Provo, Utah to try to figure out what was the correct nametag for a president and get new nametags made for them. They also came out here without Kanga pouches. Those are document pouches that are held onto your belt by two little straps and then the pouch is slipped securely inside your pants or skirt. They are a must here. You must have your passport on your person at all times. So the MTC is sending out new nametags and Kanga pouches for them with one of the new arriving missionaries on August 3rd—the most dependable way to get things here. The best part was that I got to briefly talk to my dear friend Sherri Curtis who works at the MTC bookstore when I called out there. That was fun.
24 July 2011 - Sunday
Today is Pioneer Day in Utah, but it went unnoticed here, obviously. Friday Phil and I had to take an immigration trip. Technically, we are supposed to leave for three months and then wait three months before we can enter again. But to get around that law, the US government gives all its citizens who live in Russia two passports. You live in the country with passport A for three months, leave the country with passport A so it has a dated exit stamp on it, and then turn around and reenter the country with passport B and get a new dated stamp. After another three months, you leave the country again with passport B and turn around and reenter with passport A that has sat idle for three months. We will do this the whole time we live here. Since our one Moldovan and four Ukrainian missionaries also have to leave the country and go to Finland to get a three-month stamp on their passports (former Soviet bloc countries don’t have to technically stay out for three months, just get a new stamp on their passports), we went with the five of them to Finland on Friday. To make the trip at least a little worthwhile, we drove on to Helsinki and went through one Temple session and then headed back.
We left our apartment at 4:30 am, driving through the empty streets of St. Petersburg, heading north and west. It seems to be that only about that time of morning are things calm. The streets usually still have plenty of people on them at 1 am. There is an obvious demarcation between Russia and Finland. The upper part of Russia is very pretty and rural. There were tall, spikey, light lavender flowers growing in the countryside (they have something similar that grows in the fields of Massachusetts) and pretty yellow- and white-flowering weeds. It was very nice to be out of the city. It was easy to breathe again. There are no exhaust regulations on the vehicles here and it can be nasty and difficult sometimes to take a breath.
Going through the border is an experience. The cars line up way ahead of the check point and turn off their engines and just sit until they are told to pull forward. There were miles of tractor trailers pulled off to the side waiting inspection, going each direction. The guards allow only so many cars in each group to approach the checkpoint. Everyone has to get out and go stand in line to have their passports checked and stamped. Then you pile back into the car and drive a little bit and a guard stops the car to check everyone’s passport again to make sure they all have the right stamp. You go through the same routine at the next country’s checkpoint. And through both checkpoints again on the way back into Russia. The trick is to remember which passport to give the guards at which checkpoint. If you don’t do it right, you can be deported because of visa problems. We have a paid secretary in the office, Natasha, whose job is to keep track of everyone’s immigration and visa trips, order travel for all the natives, and make sure that all the new paperwork these trips engender is completed properly after we return. A Russian in this position is vital. It is a big deal. Then Gennady, who is over registration, has to get us all registered again with the government. Another big deal. We will have to work with Gennady and registration on Monday when we go into the office. The Communists turned bureaucracy into a fine art and it lives on in Russia. And they love little official stamps on everything.
The drive through Finland to Helsinki was gorgeous. On our last mission, we spent five days in Finland in December with a Russian group going to the Temple. The church has a dormitory there to house people coming in from Russia and other Eastern European countries. Finland is incredibly expensive and these people simply can’t afford to stay in motels there. Last time we went the dorm was full, so we stayed with a Finnish couple who were in the temple presidency and we worked at the Temple with them from 7 am until about 7 or 8 pm every day. Since it was December, we left in the dark and returned in the dark, so all we saw of Finland was what was illuminated by the car’s headlights. It was great to actually “see” Finland this time. It is a combination of a garden and the best of America’s National Parks. And all I saw were fields and forests along the freeway. We tried to take some pictures from our moving van, but the photos didn’t turn out all that well.
We did make one stop at a Finnish store on the way back. The store reminded me of a large super Target, but the prices were incredibly expensive. The missionaries liked to go around and look at everything—the quality of goods is so much higher in Finland and the variety was great and they had everything all in one place. I think they wanted to buy some souvenirs, but it cost too much. So they bought candy bars. That was their dinner. Phil went into the hamburger joint next door and bought one little hamburger for us to split and two little cups of ice cream. He thinks it costs him over $10. He said he didn’t want to know how much, he just paid. The town we were in sort of reminded me of a beach resort. The people were all tooling around town on bikes. Many folks just parked their bikes in the large bike rack at the store. Most were not locked. Some had a flimsy lock that basically locked the back brake pads down, making it difficult to turn the back wheel, but none were chained up. Last time we were here, the couple we stayed with said that Finland had almost no crime. I believe it. The place has a nice, comfortable, laid back air about it.
It was obvious when we went back into Russia, although it was not as harsh a jolt as going back last time from Finland to Moscow. St. Petersburg has a much nicer feel to it. We hit a traffic jam about 80 miles from St. Petersburg. You could see that it was blocked for miles. Our driver was a native of the area and he immediately took off on some byroad to go around it. I think that added over an hour to travel time, but we probably would have sat that long in that jam. It was good to keep moving through the rural countryside rather than sit and breathe exhaust fumes for hours. I could tell when we hit populated areas—it hurt to breathe again.
Our driver dropped us off at the northern most Metro stop and we took the subway back home. Traffic is just too crazy in the city in the evening to try to make the drive in. City officials predict that sometime this summer the city will reach total, constant gridlock because more and more people are buying cars. The subway ride was about 45 minutes; the walk from the Metro to our place is only 15 minutes, but it seemed longer because we were tired. We then had to go over to the office to take care of a few things, so we didn’t get back to the apartment until 10 pm. A long, but nice day. Traveling with the Eastern European elders was interesting. They just got into their regular travel mode—they hardly said a peep the whole way there and back. You don’t generally talk on Russian transport much. So they just sat, dozed and only spoke occasionally. Not like taking a road trip with five young rowdy Americans.
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