Sister Durfee and I rejoicing in our recent reunion.

How was everyone's Christmas? Good. 

I'll start at the beginning of the week. We did an exchange with the sisters in Tuzla! Sister Vukorepa left me and I stayed in Banja Luka with.... Sister Durfee! Remember her? My beautiful, tall companion from Zagreb? Yep that's her. Oh, how I love small missions. You get to see your friends all the time!

Here's an interesting thing that I'm not entirely sure is true, but it's my current theory: people in the Balkans respond better to tall people. I feel like in America, if two ladies over 5'11 were to stop you on the street, you'd either run and hide or you'd think you'd walked onto a beach volleyball court. But here, they just eat it up. That might be because the females are taller here (but the men typically aren't -- what's up with that?). In any case, we had a lot of fun! And we talked to some groovy people. 

Next: I'm still getting excited for Christmas! It was fun to Skype our families on Friday the 25th, but the rest of our festivities will not take place until January 7th. That means I'm still listening to Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas CDs and the halls are still decked. How neat is that?

Yesterday, Sunday, we put on a Christmas program for church service. Our district sang "Away in a Manger" (in the language, of course), other people sang, we read the Nativity, all that awesome stuff. And, of course, we invited everyone and their dog to come. The cool thing is, a ton of people really did come! I think we had more non-members there than members. Probably 50-50 (which, okay, isn't that hard if you only have 5 active members in the whole county). But we had a bunch of English class students and investigators there who loved it, and some more friends joined us for the luncheon that we put on afterward. One of our students makes desserts for a living, and she knows that cheesecake is in my heart (it's really rare here, and when they do make it it is NOT the same), so she showed up with a PHILADELPHIA style cheese cake. #Heaven.

It was a really good day. I love singing. I appreciate that a lot more now that I'm out here. There's nothing that gets me in the gospel mood more than singing a good hymn. Hallelujah!

Happy New Year!

We also ate at the FANCIEST restaurant ever (at which I paid about $13 for a meal
and dessert) on Friday. Definitely upscale. That red ball was a cheesecake.