Guess who's coming for dinner?

This week has been one of those weeks where I spent most of the time in the kitchen preparing meals. I was able to get caught up on my emails that came in last week while in Germany and there were several families at the Eden House we wanted to visit with so everything fell perfectly! Lucky for you, I didn't take pictures of each family! The family that came for dinner on Tuesday night has been in town for two months having a baby. The baby slept the whole time!!!!

Wednesday night the Banks came. Their boys were wonderfully polite, enjoyed foosball downstairs, drawing with color pencils and eating the chocolate cake we had for dessert. Due to the financial constraints within our company, the Banks will not be able to extend and so will be returning to the States in May. I will really miss Tamara. She's so likable! It's probably a good thing she never lived here in BP or I would have wanted to spend all my time with her!

The company for Thursday night ended up canceling in the afternoon so I stuck dinner in the freezer for another meal another day. Friday morning one of the men from Prague with our company came for breakfast. We did the whole spread: breakfast casserole, GRITS, and fresh fruit. Yum! Good thing I don't fix breakfasts like that very often! We were supposed to have another man spend the night with us tonight (Sunday) but he ended up canceling earlier in the week too. So, it's been a busy week in the kitchen, but not as busy as it would have been if everyone had come as originally planned!

When our guests had to cancel for Thursday, we decided to go to a movie at the mall. (We usually go on Wednesdays because that is cheap night.) As we were coming up the escalator, I saw that a new store had opened in our mall!!!! I was stunned! Darting inside to check things out, I saw that it looked like they had taken the Party City from out by Towne Center Mall and transported it to Campona Mall in Budafok! Everything in the store was in English except for the signs made locally.

A friend and I are going to be putting on a baby shower in March for one of our local moms who is due in April and you can bet I will be shopping for the baby decorations here! Just in time!

This next event was incredible! My description will never do it justice because there is no way to explain how out-of-the-box the idea was and how many hours it took to make and how many pictures it required, but I'll try!

One of our MK's has an interest in making movies, and using Playmobil figures and Lego's as the characters and scenery, he built an entire set and wrote a play that lasted 1 hour and 45 minutes long, and the plot was really good! He wrote a play about an orphanage that was going under financially, and how everyone banded together to keep it going. He literally took thousands and thousands and thousands of digital pictures, moving the Playmobil figures one small motion at a time, much like the old silent movies of the 20's and 30's. It was incredible! I can't imagine how long it took him. This film has been in the making for at least 3 years. Months ago Robert came over to our house so that he could record Glenn's voice as the police officer, and each of the voices in the characters you see above was done by one of the Brown's or other personnel living here in Budapest. The Brown's invited everyone to the "showing" on Saturday and the crowd was so big that the event was held at the local Christian school. They served popcorn and drinks to go along with it. It was great, and if I can get them to put it on Youtube, I'll be sure to post the link here! It's one of those, "You have to see it to believe it!" kind of things!

Last week you were patient enough to scroll through all my pictures of the snow, and even though we got 4 more inches of it last night, I won't show any more of the snow today. However, I wanted to show you some pictures of the houses here, and they just happen to have snow on them. These pictures were taken earlier this week when the snow was actually melting.

Not very big yards! One house next to another. Ugh.

And this is the most beautiful house of all. (Ours is on the left side.) We are fortunate that our house is on the corner so there is a little space between us an our neighbor on that side. Our landlord's wife's sister owns the other side, but we don't know if she is still living there or not. We rarely see anyone come or go out of that side of the house so we're never sure if it is occupied.

Please pray for Kari and Jonathan as they fly to Senegal on Friday, the 12th! They are going to check out things in view of their moving there to work after Jonathan finishes his studies and becomes an osteopath. They will also visit with their old friends. Senegal is where the story of Kari and Jonathan began (and an amazing story it is! I wish Kari would write a book or screen play about it!), back in 2002 when Kari was a Journeyman and Jonathan was an ISC'er. Oh, to be a mosquito on the wall while they are there and to watch them relive so many wonderful memories. Please pray for God to open doors, for smooth flights (for Kari, particularly), and renewed friendships.

We leave on Thursday for the Roma retreat in Turkey and we are taking a few days of vacation in conjunction with this trip. We are hoping to take a tour to see several of the churches that Paul visited (in the Bible)! Hopefully the internet will be working better than it was in Germany and I can do an update while there. If not, it will be when we get home.

Have a great week!