Elder Udy Serves Hungary: We went Christmas Caroling

November 26, 2018

Jó reggelt mindenkinek! (Good morning everyone)

On Saturday we tried a finding activity that I have never tried before. We went Christmas caroling around the wealthier neighborhoods in Buda, and I was shocked by people's reactions. There were 4 of us, and we would sing a song, and then afterwards we explained who we are, why we are here, and that Christmas is soon approaching and we would love to come back in a week or 2 to share the Christmas story with all of them. People would ask us when we could come back. We were only able to do this for about 30 minutes because of time, but a couple of families agreed for us to come back, so we for sure are going to try Christmas caroling in November again.

Christmas caroling

As office secretaries we have to plan all of the travel for the Romanian missionaries and buy their train/plane tickets. Since trains don't run as frequently over there, and the cities can be really far away from each other, we handle the travel. My companion Elder Burnett, has always done it by himself, but now President Hettinger wanted us to both arrange the travel. So this past week I learned how to plan travel for all the Romanian missionaries during their exchanges, zone conferences, etc. Also, this past week President Hettinger wanted information on all the baptisms in Hungary over the past 3 years, so I made a spreadsheet with some graphs to interpret the data. This is good practice for me because when I am older I will probably be doing the same thing only with dollar signs, haha.

Some Hungarian food that I have tried and have liked is pökölt, which is a stew that is usually served on pasta. It consists of a meat, like beef, paprika, and some vegetables. It is probably my favorite Hungarian dish.

Something new that I tried this week at a restaurant that was good was something called Hortobágyi Palacsinta. It is like a crepe that is filled with meat and a paprika sauce. It is pretty similar to the pökölt, but instead of eating it on pasta it is inside of a crepe with sauce on top.

I haven't gotten permission to drive yet, because I have yet to take the test, but maybe this week I will get it. I have been fed goulash, and it is good but not my favorite. I prefer the pökölt. We have some investigators but the problem is getting them progressing. Hopefully some of the new ones we have will start. We just got the materials for “Light the World” last week. I’m not quite sure what special thing we will do for it, but I think we will make some sort of plan. Light the World initiative 2018 That is good that you had the missionaries over for Thanksgiving dinner. We also had a Thanksgiving dinner because we were fed by a senior missionary couple that day.