Dear family,

So the funny thing about the 2 investigators named Kristaç from last week is that Kristaç isn't all that common of a name here.  Mario is fairly common, although we meet about a bazillion Gëzims, Besims, and Shpëtims. (Their names mean Joy, Faith, and Salvation, all of which are male names)  There are also men named Yllber which means rainbow.  The names are funny when we look at their meanings.

This past week, Elder Castro-Guzman got a new pen.  I think it is a fountain pen.  The pen was 300 lekë ($3) and the bottle of ink was 150 lekë ($1.50).  I was surprised and wondered why anybody would spend $4.50 on a pen.  Later on, I found out how long that was going to last him, and realized it ended up being a rather reasonable price even for someone who doesn't care about pens like me.  So I ended up buying one too.  It writes really well.  It's kind of fun.

So you know you've spent a long time in Albania when you see a small cement square surrounded by solid cement/brick buildings with a falling apart fence surrounding a small cement soccer field and you think it looks like fun.  There's not all that much grass around here.  Albania makes me think of a giant cement parking lot sometimes.  Just how everything you see is made out of cement.  Rarely can you look anywhere and not see cement.  Luckily, cementiness doesn't have too much of an effect on missionary work.

Last night, we were street contacting, and a German guy came, and he couldn't really speak English or Albanian.  He tried communicating, for what and why I still am clueless.  I was able to pick a couple things out of his German like zehr goed (or something like that, I can't spell German) and weinig; basically stuff that was close to dutch that I happened to still remember.  However, none of our languages worked together, so our conversation was just stagnant and not going anywhere.  I just understood that he really liked Germany, but said how Albania was "slecht", which I think means bad.  He said it meant no good, so I think bad would be a good translation.

Anyways, not too much else happened this week.  A couple kids yesterday wished me a happy Halloween, so that was cool.  They don't celebrate it here, but people still know about it.  I assume it's similar to how we know about Cinco de Mayo.  One thing I do know they celebrate is New Years.  I will have to get some pictures of that.  I've seen some photos and videos of other missionaries, and it looks insane.  I heard somewhere that we aren't allowed to go outside during New Years.  I'm pretty excited for it.  Anyways, that's all I got for this week.

Love,

Elder Wallentine