Day 222: Super Saturday Shopping and Such

10 avril 2010 (Day 222)
Today was not at all the day I was expecting, but it was awesome nonetheless. Hannah and I were either going to go shopping or to the beach so I decided to go drop off cookies for the elders and go to the Saturday market before then. I went shopping and the elders called to say that they couldn’t make it but that I could come teaching with them at 2pm at the church. I agreed and decided that I might as well stay in town since it wouldn’t be worth it to spend all my time going back home and into town again. Instead I went shopping and found several really cute shirts to wear as a sister missionary. I am really excited about them because they look really nice and I won’t be looking frumpy in Paris! I also went and got to macarons, went to the book store, and went to find the Greek restaurant in town to get a falafel. It took me a while to find the restaurant but I found it and got a delightful hummus falafel. The owner works there with his cute younger son and it was just a fun experience.
I ate my falafel on the way to the church and met up there with the missionaries and Lisa. She is a cute girl from China that speaks English and French very well. She studied in Ohio and there she became involved in the Protestant church. She said that lately she has been far away from God. Elder Lazarev offered a prayer in Chinese and then afterwards she started praying in English! Elder Lazarev’s face said it all. In the middle of the prayer she was like, “I don’t know what I’m doing! I don’t know how.” And then she would switch into Chinese. Her prayer was really sincere and you could tell that she wanted to come closer to God. She apologized that it wasn’t a “good” prayer and so then we started talking about how we need to be sincere and be like a child and that flowerly prayers aren’t necessarily better. We ended up not teaching the lesson but watching a church movie on Finding Faith which was nice. I haven’t seen the film in a while. Lisa won’t be at church tomorrow because she is going on vacation, but she should be coming next week. The elders said that I will be a big role in her progression because they feel that she is going to be tried by her friends and that it will be important for her to have friends who are “normal” members of the church.
I did a little bit more shopping…glancing mostly after the lesson but by then there were far too many people shopping. I showed Hannah my new shirts, which she loves and then we decided to have dinner together and make no bake cookies since she is off her sugar lent. We watched some of My Fair Lady with Spanish subtitles which was hilarious because we were trying to read them out loud while giving back rubs. Hopefully there weren’t any Spanish people around! We stayed up pretty late, especially since we had to wake up early to catch the tram.